South of Midnight is a gorgeous game that explores the American Deep South. After taking in all the scenery, you might notice that it doesn't have a manual save feature. Puzzled when playing through it for the first time, I opened the pause menu, realized there was no manual save option, and submitted myself to the auto-save system.

Given how challenging parts of the game can be, or how many collectibles can be found (over 2000), saving is an essential part of South of Midnight. Understandably, you don't want to take the time to find every Floof cache in a chapter, or to take down a tough enemy, and then have that progress lost. Whether you're working your way through all the achievements in South of Midnight or you want to finish the breezy 10-ish hour story, it's essential to know how the save system works so you don't lose any progress.

You Can't Save In South Of Midnight

The Game Will Automatically Save Instead

South of Midnight does not have a traditional manual save system, to the chagrin of every excessive manual saver in existence. Instead, it relies entirely on an auto-save feature that is fairly aggressive in how it handles logging your progress. After doing basically anything of note in South of Midnight, a small icon will appear in the lower left-hand corner of the screen, showing that your progress has been auto-saved.

This icon denotes that the game has fully saved your progress, and you can move on, knowing that a sudden crash or power outage won't damper your last session. Auto-saves typically happen before entering a combat arena or after clearing a puzzle. This means that, generally, the game will save whenever you're at an important milestone.

Why You Can't Save In South Of Midnight

In Any Case, Auto-Saves Will Do The Best They Can

Developer Compulsion Games has not stated why there is no manual save option in South of Midnight, but there are myriad reasons why a game like this may not have one. Whether it was simply a design philosophy decision given the game's relatively short length (clocking in at 10 hours) or a technical limitation, ideally, at some point in the future, we'll get a manual save option for posterity. Given that it's widely available on Xbox Game , I'm sure a lot of fans are requesting it already.

There is a silver lining in all this, as you'll have the ability to revisit old chapters and grab things you missed the first time around. The game states that "the number of collectible items accumulates," which is highly confusing to parse at first. What the developers of South of Midnight mean is that if you reload a previous chapter, you can enter it and collect missed items (like skill and health upgrades) while keeping them in your core save file.