Review for South of the Circle
If I had to choose between writing a thesis on cloud patterns for Cambridge University or traversing the snowy, desolate landscape of the Antarctic alone, I wouldn’t have been able to pick which one is the worst. Nevertheless, in State of Play’s South of the Circle, you can play as a man who does both. This beautiful narrative takes you on an engaging and immersive journey. Despite its 4 hours of gameplay, it manages to tell an intriguing story, if not for a couple of plot holes here and there.
The aesthetic style is exquisite, almost like a vintage graphic style with no outlines and wonderful use of colours and light. Some scenes are bright and vivid when you, for instance, observe a car from the outside as it drives through the English countryside; in others, you only see dark silhouettes where the focal point is the only thing that is illuminated. South of the Circle is cinematically and visually gorgeous, and its vintage graphic style goes well with the historical time and setting.
Set during the Cold War in the 60s, you play Peter, a timid and introverted Cambridge academic who studies cloud patterns and is writing, or at least trying to write, a paper on the topic. The game consists of two plot lines that run parallel with each other. The first plot line, as already mentioned, is with Cambridge and Peter’s attempt at an academic career. The second and primary plot line concerns Peter and his colleague, Floyd, as they crash their airplane while flying over the Antarctic. Floyd, the pilot of the plane, is injured, and it is up to Peter to go and get help. Oh, did I mention that they crashed in the Antarctic? Yeah. Not much help to get there.
As Peter struggles through the South Pole, the past and the present shift elegantly in and out along the way. You are walking through endless snowy landscapes in one moment, only to have it beautifully shift to the streets of Cambridge in another. South of the Circle does a brilliant job weaving in Peter’s back story, with scenes from his childhood and his trying to build an academic career, leading to why he is in the Antarctic.
Back in Cambridge, Peter meets Clara, a fellow academic, who helps him to write his thesis, and their relationship evolves into something more than just study buddies. The story is set in the early ’60s when women weren’t well respected in the academic world. Soon Peter is forced to choose between his loyalty and love for Clara or his future career at Cambridge.
The game is mainly driven forward by exploration and dialogue instead of puzzles. There is a large focus on the dialogue, but instead of directly choosing what Peter says in conversations, you choose an emotional response with different symbols representing them. You can choose from five different “moods” or “responses”: shy, enthusiastic, concerned, assertive, and caring. I had to draw up all the different responses and their respective symbols in the beginning, as I couldn’t remember which symbol represented the emotional response. There is a section in the settings where they are explained, but I couldn’t be bothered to tab out to the menu each time there was a conversation response to be made. This way of steering the conversation is original, but it only gives you the illusion of choosing the story's path. Unfortunately, no matter how you have Peter react and choose, it doesn’t impact the outcome of the game.
Even though you can’t impact how the story goes, it doesn’t make it less riveting. Almost immediately after the game started, I got pulled in by the story, and I got the sense that there was a mystery somewhere to be solved. When Peter fights his way through the unwelcoming landscape of the Antarctic, he discovers abandoned research stations and eerie grave marks outside of settlements, and the uncanny feeling that something is not quite right is prevalent throughout the entire game. Combined with the paranoia of the Cold War, not to mention the mental and physical strain of being stranded in literally nowhere, the story builds and evolves as you can feel Peter’s desperation in trying to get to safety.
Since the game focuses more on narrative, there aren’t any puzzles to solve. You don’t have an inventory, and other than moving forward and steering conversations, the game experience is quite unchallenging. The voice acting and soundtrack, not to mention excellent writing, weigh up for the lack of puzzles and challenges. The music is well composed and spans from mellow background music to intense orchestral works that help make some scenes overwhelming and extraordinary.
I must admit that the ending didn’t make sense to me at first. I was a bit underwhelmed and even confused, to be honest. Such a great story should have a great ending, but unfortunately, there were too many plot holes and loose threads. Maybe it’s just me, and I understand it is supposed to be an open ending, obviously open to interpretation. However, it didn’t produce the perfect punctuation mark that the rest of the story deserves. Some parts of the story suddenly flew by without much explanation. Even though I understand that when you have a short game of around 4 hours, you can’t elaborate on everything, some aspects were just suddenly cut off or not explained in a way that made much sense, whereas, in other scenes, things are carefully described.
These plot holes fueled my further confusion about the ending itself, I didn’t get time to process some of the things that happened, and I didn’t understand the conclusion until a couple of days after finishing the game. Even now, I’m unsure if my interpretation of it is correct.
Although it is a puzzle-free game experience, South of the Circle tells a beautiful and riveting cinematic story about love, politics, and the struggles of life itself, accompanied by a fantastic soundtrack and brilliant voice acting. The story promises a lot, but because of the abrupt ending and many loose threads, it fails to deliver in the end, missing out on what could have been a nearly perfect narrative adventure.
