South of the Circle Review: An Interactive Love Story with an Emotional Wallop

The game’s biggest triumph is in accomplishing so much with the most basic of dramatic tools.

South of the Circle
Photo: 11 Bit Studios

State of Play’s South of the Circle walks a tenuous line in terms of providing a truly interactive experience. Aside from frequent text bubbles that allow us to select the exact tone that the game’s protagonist, a British academic named Peter, can take during a conversation, we don’t get a whole lot of agency in how that story plays out. South of the Circle is more of a mildly interactive animated film for most of its roughly two-and-a-half-hour campaign. Yet there’s a huge emotional wallop waiting for us across that stretch of time, where it becomes difficult to imagine the game without its limited interactivity.

South of the Circle is a game that asks for a lot of faith from its audience, and it surprisingly earns it. But that’s not an easy ask at the outset. The game does start on a tense, attention-grabbing note. It’s 1964 and Peter, a distinctly nebbish, Hugh Grant type, wakes up in a crashed plane in the middle of the Antarctic wilderness, and next to him is the plane’s pilot, whose leg is utterly mangled. They aren’t far from Britain’s base camp in the frozen wasteland, but as one can imagine, taking an unexpected hike in Antarctica isn’t a fun, springtime stroll.

That is, until suddenly it is. Peter copes with his frostbitten trudge for survival by dissociating back to better days, as a climate science lecturer at Cambridge on the verge of a breakthrough with a paper on cloud tracking, and equally on the verge of happiness in a professional and romantic relationship with a fellow lecturer named Clara. While the Antarctic sections of the game don’t offer much to look at, how the game transitions between past and present, using an abstract watercolor style to create a swoony dream-like vibe, makes even the most mundane scenes from Peter’s memory feel like rooms in a glorious memory palace.

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Even more impressive is South of the Circle’s pitch-perfect execution of two gaming fundamentals: voice acting and mocap direction. The cast is full of folks who’ve been around the bend of big productions for years, and their performances lend an enormous amount of weight to what only seems like a simple love story between academics. Think The Imitation Game or Theory of Everything as directed by Richard Linklater in full Waking Life mode and you have an idea of how hypnotic and captivating this game can be at its best, while also hinting at how dry and reserved it can get at its most unsatisfying.

There’s a stiff-upper-life quality to South of the Circle that means that its success hinges entirely on it satisfactorily answering one question: Where are we going with all this? Thankfully, right around the point that the game feels as if it’s about to outstay its welcome, it starts tying all of its disparate plot points and minor decision-making scenes together with its distinct timeframe and setting. Peter’s research and his relationship, as it turns out, puts him in the middle of a Cold War standoff between Russia, Norway, and England, as well as a crisis of faith stemming from good old-fashioned misogyny in British academia.

How it all relates to Peter’s present—where the Antarctic camps all appear to be abandoned recently and hurriedly—manages to instill a deep amount of intrigue with so very little plot-wise. The truth about how and why Peter wound up here leads to some smartly executed Eternal Sunshine-style reframing of everything that players have seen, and even though we don’t get to make many choices throughout, those choices do matter in their own way in the end. While its aesthetic showcases no small amount of innovation, South of the Circle’s biggest triumph is in accomplishing so much with the most basic of dramatic tools.

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This game was reviewed using a code provided by Evolve PR.

Score: 
 Developer: State of Play  Publisher: 11 Bit Studios  Platform: PlayStation 5  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Language, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco, Mild Violence  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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