I have rarely had such mixed feelings after finishing a game as with Bye Sweet Carole. I want to draw attention to the fantastic visuals and animations that genuinely look as if they are plucked out of a real Golden Age Disney feature film. I want to commend the incredible soundtrack that I cannot believe wasn’t composed by Frank Churchill (Snow White, Dumbo, Bambi). I want to praise the feminist narrative that highlights the 1910s suffragette movement of the UK. I will praise all of the strengths of Bye Sweet Carole where it is due them. Sadly, I cannot earnestly do these things without also warning you that this adventure title is entirely comprised of some of the worst gameplay, structure, level design, and puzzles I’ve seen in my three decades of gaming.
The story sets us with a rebellious young woman named Lana, who is at a finishing school for girls in the UK in the 1910s. Lana doesn’t fit in with the other proper young women at Bunny Hall, and her teacher Ms. Hinman is always on her case for anything she finds out of place in high society. The other girls tease, bully, and outright abuse her. And her single friend, her best friend, Carole, has been missing for days. A series of mysterious happenings send Lana literally down the rabbit hole looking for clues as to the whereabouts of her lost friend, transforming her into a bunny. A mysterious man made of tar and shadow called Mr. Kyn is out for her blood, and is attempting to shred her to pieces – but not before causing her to experience the truest horror a human can. Her only ally is a goofy-looking man who wouldn’t look out of place in a Steamboat Willie cartoon, Mr. Basie, who can pop his head off his body at will.
When I say that Bye Sweet Carole is both beautiful and faithful to its inspirations, I am criminally understating the craft that went into it. When Lana takes her bunny form, you can see the twitching of her ears is just like Thumper in Bambi. The wobbly movement of Mr. Basie is straight out of the broom soldiers from Fantasia. The swirling animation of Lana’s transformation sequences immediately clocked in my head as from Cinderella. The landscapes call to mind the dulled but colorfully saturated color palettes used in Robin Hood and Sleeping Beauty. It’s so lovingly done, and with such detail, that some of these visuals brought me to the edge of tears with their sheer power.
Bye Sweet Carole is equally impressive and immersive in its soundtrack, invoking Fantasia’s frenetic energy whenever danger is afoot. The sound effects are excellent, and everything down to the rustling of Lana’s sleeves in the breeze is purposefully and carefully used in conjunction with the score. The creaking of the floors, the ticking of the grandfather clock in an enormous empty foyer, the squeaking of the pipes; all of it adds to building an atmosphere.
I really appreciated where the story went. I think the beginning is very strong, and the ending is pretty incredible, but the middle five hours are pretty damn miserable and boring. It’s so hard to tell what is happening in real life and what is fantasy during the game, which is intentional, but it also makes it hard to track how I’m supposed to feel about the characters because I don’t know what aspects of their characters are real. I did at first think the feminist themes came off too heavy-handed, but as I got into the game and was reminded of what life was like for women in the 1910s fighting for the right to be classified as humans, I like how straightforward and not-subtle it is.
Here is where my praise must stop. Without exaggeration, moving Lana through this world feels like dragging a sack of potatoes through the mud. I don’t know that I’ve experienced such bad-feeling movement in recent years, especially not in a game that has a lot of running and platforming segments. Lana feels unresponsive when she begins and ends movement, and there’s no “feedback” when she is jumping or falling. She also moves aggravatingly slowly, even with the run button held, and these environments are so big I feel that half the game was me running back and forth across a level screaming at her to move faster. Even in bunny form, when she moves twice as fast, she feels twice as bad to control.
Another huge problem I have with Bye Sweet Carole is that all of the actions are contextual. Pressing A near a ledge while the huge prompt on screen is highlighted will cause Lana to jump up and grab the ledge (most of the time), but when she’s not near a ledge the A button doesn’t do anything. The X button is to use something, but it is only active when she’s near something that can be used. These giant button prompts are aggravating and cover a huge part of the screen and look so ugly, pulling me out of the Disney fantasy every three seconds.
Like other adventure games, gameplay mostly consists of solving puzzles by running around, collecting objects, combining them in your inventory, and using them to manipulate the environment. Besides the fact that the environments are so big and feel awful to traverse, they’re also designed at every angle to make your experience worse. There are so many boxes and shelves to slowly climb over with a five second animation, so many holes that it’s easy to fall in and die because the platforming controls are terrible, and so many stairs that it’s nearly impossible to let the game know you want to climb. Lana will sometimes jump off a ladder to a new platform and simply fall down because the game is so bad at calculating where anything is moving at any given time.
During the puzzles, which I think were all either too easy or far too obscure, you’re often being chased by some tar monster who is constantly stalking you. If they catch you, game over and you go back to the last save point. I will commend Bye Sweet Carole for autosaving very frequently. The problem is that now the game is about running from this monster, hiding in one of the cabinets that’s in every room, and holding LT to hold your breath while it passes by. This happens every minute or so in a lot of puzzles and it is so, so annoying. I actually got so fed up with it near the end that I just turned into a bunny and started running by the monster every time I saw it, not even bothering to hide. Is this meant to be an adventure game or a hiding-under-tables-from-the-monster game?
There was one section in particular where there was a tar monster chasing me everywhere while I ran around the mines trying to get some machines working. When it encountered light, it disappeared and screamed. However, I had to keep constantly lighting every light I saw manually by spamming the X button every single time I ran past one, because they only lasted for 10 seconds before going out again. So there I was, running back and forth, slowly pushing boxes and getting locked into incorrect contextual movements while the tar monster kept finding me. It happened every second over and over again, and I was frustrated beyond belief at how bad a gameplay experience I was having.
The puzzles, especially the last few, are horribly over-complicated and not intuitive at all. There is also no form of hint or even environmental guides built into the levels. I feel strongly that the developers have no concept of how to design a level to guide the player. It’s all scenery, all form and no function, and although the levels are beautiful they seem to never make sense from a gameplay perspective. How am I to know that I’m supposed to jump to reach the red beaker in the science lab when the controls and design are so bad that I’ve tried it literally twenty times? I had to believe that I was simply not doing the right thing, but no, it is in fact the game’s fault. Without a guide, I would have never completed the final puzzles because the levels were designed so poorly they made me feel like every action I took was wrong.
When playing as Mr. Basie, the controls become, if possible, even worse. As a tall floppy man he is even less responsive and less satisfying to control. But the worst part is that four hours into the game he randomly has a horde battle and combat is suddenly introduced into this adventure game with no previous combat sections. There was a horde of monsters I could only fight by spamming the RB button to whack them with my umbrella over and over again, followed by maybe the worst boss fight I’ve ever experienced. Again, I have a singular attack, and both movement and using the attack feels terrible – seven minutes later, the battle was over, and I can only describe my feeling as abject misery.
At least, I thought that was the worst boss battle I’d ever played until the ending, where I suddenly am fighting a huge boss in only the second combat section in the game. This was miserable, again feeling like dragging a block of cement through a vat of glue, while I was expected to be dodging, blocking, parrying, and fighting a horde of monsters all at once. This was really the final straw for me, and I have to admit that I grew to truly hate Bye Sweet Carole.
I don’t have a way to dress this up nicely: Bye Sweet Carole might be the worst-feeling game I’ve ever played. It made me miserable. The movement made me frustrated every second, the levels were horrible to traverse, and any fun I might have had with the puzzles was ruined by monsters hunting me every 10 seconds over and over. This game has no idea what it wants to be, and I am flabbergasted that the developers didn’t elect to just make a movie. It’s beautiful in both visuals and sound, and it is such a shame that this story is trapped in this game. It deserves better. You deserve better too, which is why I don’t recommend anyone under any circumstances play Bye Sweet Carole.
Nirav reviewed Bye Sweet Carole on PC with a provided review copy.
