I’ve had good luck with games this year. Even the ones I wasn’t particularly excited to review have turned out better than expected. The exception is Bye Sweet Carole, which is a shame, because it was the one I was looking forward to the most. On paper — or in this case, in screenshots — it hits all my indie-darling buttons:
Narrative adventure: Check
Dark fantasy: Check
Horror: Check
Hand-drawn art: Check
Unfortunately, none of these elements come together in a satisfying way. The main problem is that Bye Sweet Carole tries to do too much with too little. Its ambitions are lofty, but it never takes the time to see any of them through. The game leans heavily on its gorgeous hand-drawn animation and painterly backdrops to mask the lack of substance at its core. It seems promising at first, despite the awkward narration and occasional visual hiccups. But as the story drags on, it becomes clear that this ambitious project isn’t just stumbling forward — it’s tripping over its own feet.
Bye Sweet Carole tells the story of Lana, an imaginative young woman trapped in “Bunnyhall,” an oppressive school for girls. She is desperately investigating the disappearance of her friend Carole while contending with malevolent forces bleeding over from the mythical world of Corolla. The story is convoluted, underwritten, and awkwardly presented. It’s clichéd, on-the-nose storytelling attempts to hold onto a fairly basic plot, but it constantly teeters on the edge of incoherence. There are a few twists and turns that I won’t spoil, but rest assured that none of them feel earned or particularly surprising.
“Bye Sweet Carole takes about four hours to complete, but it feels like ten.”
The key thing a narrative adventure needs is a decent story, and if it’s done well, some characters to care about. Bye Sweet Carole has neither. It painted its world with overly broad brush strokes and populated it with two-dimensional caricatures. The central themes are admirable, but their direct presentation can come across as insincere, undermining the whole thing.
Bye Sweet Carole takes about four hours to complete, but it feels like ten. Most of that time is spent slowly moving backtracking through the game’s beautiful backgrounds, fetching one item to unlock the next. Each back-and-forth trip will include some quicktime events, which more often than not require repeating the same balancing minigame. As the game progresses, instead of the balancing challenge getting harder, the ledges get longer, and the game forces you to do the quick time event multiple times.
Occasionally, Lana must polymorph into a bunny to tackle platforming and wall-jumping sections, but the real challenge lies in wrestling with the controls. Wall jumps don’t always register, timing feels inconsistent, and the ledges you’re meant to grab aren’t always aligned with the graphics. Collision and control issues even carry over into the combat sections — thankfully, there aren’t many of those.
“The key thing a narrative adventure needs is a decent story, and if it’s done well, some characters to care about. Bye Sweet Carole has neither.”
Some areas require switching between characters with different powers to solve environmental puzzles, while others have you moving backward and forward through time. These sections are actually quite enjoyable — they should have made up the entire game — but unfortunately, they occupy only a tiny fraction of the playtime. Having a sidekick you must burn, pulverize, and electrocute to solve problems is genuinely fun, but you only get to do it twice. The dancing minigame, by contrast, is a simple rhythm challenge that is repeated ad nauseam, always with the same animation and difficulty level.
More than anything else, this is an experience people are going to check out for the art. After all, it’s being sold on its Disney-style animation and hand-drawn graphics. To that end, it’s beautiful — I wish there was more of it. Bye Sweet Carole relies heavily on a limited set of animation cycles, and the cutscenes lack proper lip-syncing. There’s also noticeable artifacting in 4K, along with occasional colour glitches and flickering throughout. Still, the backgrounds are some of the most impressive I’ve seen in the last few years.
In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m not a big fan of Bye Sweet Carole. Every time a new chapter header popped up on the screen, I let out a sigh or a raspy “Oy vey.” The best parts of Bye Sweet Carole can be experienced by watching the trailer, but if you want to support a small studio or encourage more hand-drawn art in games, it’s worth a purchase. But as an experience to enjoy? No. Nothing in the game is fundamentally broken, but at the same time, nothing feels fully realized or truly complete. It’s too little butter over too much bread.
