South of the Circle – Test: Cold War, the great love – and your promise for eternity?

Emotional and very accurate story about big and small decisions – imaginatively staged and with a clever dialogue system.

I don’t want to swap places with Peter! Because together with his colleague Floyd he was stranded in Antarctica after a plane crash. Of course, they can’t reach anyone via radio and so Peter has no choice but to leave the protection of the small propeller plane and look for help in the eternal ice. The year is 1964 and fortunately there are already various research stations in the area, the first of which is in the immediate vicinity. So you push Peter through the thick snow towards the red light that is blinking in the distance…

… to quickly determine that the red light belongs to the signal of a platform where Peter boarded a train a few years ago. There he met Clara, with whom he would fall in love and with whom he would plan a life together. That’s right: the search for help in Antarctica alternates with the memories of meeting and reconnecting with Clara – which takes place in excellently written and elegantly filmed scenes, the dialogues of which are carefully steered with multiple choice decisions.

what was yesterday

South of the Circle is one of those games that wants to tell a story above all, and that story revolves around Peter, who works on his academic career at Cambridge, and Clara, who shares his teaching and research there. It is set in the early 1960s, at a time when gender roles were clear, Cold War tensions were palpable and communist Russians were the ultimate evil.

During this time, Peter gets caught between all stools: with his socially and politically very conservative professor on the one hand and Clara on the other, who is committed to stopping the nuclear arms race, as well as friends and family, who also have their own motives approach him. And of course there is always the question of what is actually happening in Antarctica, where he is not finding the help he was hoping for in completely abandoned research stations.

State of Play (that’s the name of the developer studio without any connection to Sony’s streaming conference of the same name) or author and director Luke Whittaker manages this triangle of mysterious crime, social tension and gentle romance extremely well, especially since they are all equal building blocks of the same story . The two planes of time – Peter’s present and his memories of his time in Cambridge – also come together in the end in a way that is as logical as it is thought-provoking.

In any case, it gave me something to think about and it still does today. Part of the reason is that I felt so secure in the choices I was making on Peter’s behalf, and because the way he looks down the past felt so familiar before it all finally misses a spin got – no twist in the sense of a big turn, just a slightly shifted angle – which sheds a new light on the memories. One that could have been seen much earlier. In real life anyway. That’s the point that Whittaker hits so precisely: his story is not only exciting and soulful, but also surprisingly true to life.

Planned sequence instead of heavily cut

The fact that he succeeds is partly due to his clever staging, because despite the simple brushstrokes and coloring, convincing animations bring the figures to life. The English speakers are also very special, above all Olivia Vinall as the incredibly charming Clara, whom I enjoyed listening to for the entire four hours. Admittedly, Peter, as the one whose memories one experiences, falls a bit short in my opinion. He should sometimes show a little more vigour, instead of appearing very reserved almost all of the dialogue options. But that’s just a little thing and Clara carries a large part of the story all the more as an emotional hook.

Also great are the many tracking shots that, for example, slowly move towards characters, circle them when the focus of a conversation is shifted, and then withdraw from the scene again. State of Play comes without cuts for long stretches, which draws you more into the moments. I find this staging a blessing, especially compared to the rigid shot-reverse-shot tirades of most video games.

It’s also great that even the changes between the present and memories are often made with very imaginative transitions! The red light of the research station or the railway signal mentioned at the beginning is just one of many examples. I also don’t want to forget the soundtrack, which sometimes accompanies quiet emotions, slowly swells when danger threatens and later lurks mysteriously in the background: Ed Critchley’s music lends the adventure just the right heaviness or disarming charm, depending on the scene.

It is unfortunate that technical annoyances are sometimes so noticeable that they even get in the way at some important moments. Books or bags that protrude into clothing are the lesser of two evils. Objects in the protagonist’s hands are more noticeable when they are not grabbed as intended, but instead turn away at strange angles. I would also have liked to have done without the occasional jerking of moving characters.

dictated by feeling

That’s why I like the dialogues all the more – not only because they are damn well written, namely the way people actually talk instead of chewing the content to an audience, but also because of the clever dialogue system. After all, you are not presented with fully formulated sentences or groups of words, but with symbols that describe the way in which Peter could answer.

This can be self-confident, questioning, empathetic, fearful or enthusiastic, whereby the symbols are internalized quite quickly and there are only a maximum of three of them to choose from. And although with this system you don’t know exactly what he’s going to say, you develop an amazingly good sense of how he’s reacting to Clara, for example. You are hardly busy discussing the meaning and possible consequences of an option, but emotionally involved in a pleasantly intuitive way.

Of course, there are also these typical situations in which the reaction then played does not correspond to what the player wanted to express. It is not known whether Peter will confidently refuse or agree. But it is not in your hands anyway and you can be assured that you will not suffer any disadvantages from it. The normal decisions only color the course of the current conversation, while critical decisions are marked as such and are always clearly identifiable. You can’t play wrong anyway, you can’t find a bad or good ending.

South of the Circle – Test Conclusion

Just let yourself be carried away by this wonderful story! You are part of it without writing it. State of Play and the lead Luke Whittaker know exactly which ending they want and will guide you (with small variations) exactly there – by using an elegant camera to capture very charming and delightfully lifelike characters and the different levels of their exciting, romantic story into one strong punchline. No, I really don’t want to switch places with Peter. Even if for reasons that have nothing to do with his journey across the eternal ice. In the end there is a lot more of me in him than I like. And that’s the biggest success of this emotional game film anyway.