‘Bye Sweet Carole’ Review: Disney-esque Horror Adventure Is Insipid and Obvious

Little Sewing Machine’s hand-drawn horror adventure Bye Sweet Carole is inspired by old Disney films, so it’s perhaps not a surprise that it’s as insipid and obvious as any story that talks down to children. But it’s hard not to imagine even the most forgiving youngster becoming almost immediately bored with this overwritten and sluggish game.

As a long-winded narrator informs us, Lana Benton is sad and lonely at Bunny Hall, the boarding school meant to turn out proper young ladies (according to early 20th-century standards, anyway). Her bestie, Carole Simmons, has disappeared under quite mysterious circumstances, and as Lana sets out to find her, she begins having visions of an evil, red-eyed owl and of Mr. Kyn, a sinister old man with a big mustache and an even bigger hat.

Much of the game involves Lana gingerly puzzle-platforming her way through Bunny Hall and a dreamlike wilderness. She pushes crates, throws switches, and climbs ladders, eventually able to transform into a rabbit at will for better jump height and faster movement. It’s bad enough that the game is slow going, but the environments are small and straightforward. The most complex puzzles tend to involve remembering the screwdriver you picked up several hours ago and haven’t used since. Sometimes you even have to swap to another character and make him stand on a switch. Oh, and laborious backtracking is a frequent necessity.

The hand-drawn animation is meant to be Bye Sweet Carole’s main attraction, but it’s too inconsistently realized to get swept up in. Much of the storytelling unfolds awkwardly through the game’s favored sidelong perspective, with occasional zoom-ins that the art doesn’t have the resolution to support. It wouldn’t be so bad if the story was written to accommodate the limits of the game’s animation, but you’re frequently sitting through lengthy, repetitive dialogue scenes delivered by characters who are all conspicuously facing away from the camera so their mouths don’t need to be animated. Such moments would be tiresome even if the game wasn’t full of lines like “Even if the sails aren’t hoisted doesn’t mean the wind isn’t already blowing.”

As a horror game, Bye Sweet Carole is a fundamental miscalculation. Enemies are easily avoided and don’t do much damage to your swiftly regenerating health even when they do catch you. The reason people remember disproportionately frightening scenes from a children’s cartoon is because those moments play against expectations; they stand in stark contrast to a story that otherwise doesn’t seem designed for terror. And while there’s certainly enough bland puzzling and terrible dance minigames to ensure you don’t spend all of Bye Sweet Carole cowering in the shadows, the expectation remains every time you walk past an alcove with a pop-up icon reminding you that you can hide from the monsters there.

In general, the game struggles to convey a coherent narrative around its interactive sequences, leaving the relationship between Lana and Carole underdeveloped while using the backdrop of the suffragette movement as an occasion for groan-worthy platitudes. Clearly the game is taking aim at the Disney Princess archetype, but the shots fired are all so clunky and obvious: One girl accidentally drops her manifesto for women’s liberation in front of the teacher, and later she reads from a book that just lists the names of accomplished women throughout history. If horror is meant to elicit strong emotions, the most that Bye Sweet Carole can manage is cringe.

This game was reviewed with a code provided by Maximum Entertainment.