Bye Sweet Carole is the type of game that I hate to review the most; a title that clearly shows merit—especially artistic merit—and clear care in its development. A game that was clearly created with love and passion, which makes you hate to criticize it. Yet, for one reason or another, it still warrants criticism, and while you don’t want to detract from the good, it wouldn’t be a fair review to ignore the bad. Bye Sweet Carole certainly has its fair share of good, but it’s got its bad as well, and unfortunately, it feels like it fails the most in trying to capture the most important parts of its chosen medium.
Let’s begin by addressing the big, beautiful elephant in the room: Bye Sweet Carole is a game that was brilliantly animated in a style reminiscent of the golden age of animation. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Alice in Wonderland—you can clearly see the inspirations painted all over every character and background of this gorgeous game.
The animation in Bye Sweet Carole is clearly the point. It is the main art that the developers have used the medium of gaming to convey. And what art it is; nobody could reasonably argue that Bye Sweet Carole is anything other than a masterfully executed homage to some of the greatest eras of animation in history. Meticulously hand-drawn animations persist not only through incredible and plentiful cutscenes but also in every movement or action our character makes as you play the game.
Unfortunately, it’s in playing the game that things sort of go south.
Bye Sweet Carole may put a lot of effort into its incredible animation, but the same cannot be said for its gameplay, which essentially consists of a “press right to advance” side-scrolling platformer that is iffy at best on the platforming mechanics. The game is slow and painfully uninteractive, with the majority of interactable elements being more of an illusion of choice than an actual game for players to, well, play.
The best way I can describe what I mean is by once again pointing out that Bye Sweet Carole is brilliantly animated and just absolutely packed full of that animation. The game does not want you to miss a moment of its drawn story and so essentially removes the possibility of you doing so. Almost every instance of player choice or interaction with the environment is tailored to move you along with the animated beats of the story.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the game’s use of quick-time events—or, more specifically, the inclusion of fake quick-time events. So much of the game is designed to feel like a long, continuous animated movie, but one with button prompts put up over the footage as if they were worried you might stop paying attention without extra stimuli. No small amount of these QTEs are actually false promises of gameplay, as they are designed to fail so that the upcoming animation of our protagonist tripping feels “more natural.”
The parts of the game that feel most like a game come from puzzle-solving, with the puzzles being admittedly fun to solve even if they are painfully obvious at times. Even so, the fun is not helped by the constant hints and direction on each puzzle, which feels kind of condescending. To cite one puzzle early on in the game: I’m pretty capable of figuring out that in order to get an owl to leave his perch, I’ll need to catch a mouse. I can also figure out that to catch a mouse, I’ll need to put cheese in a trap. And yet, these are both situations where the game felt like you had to stop and be told by our protagonist what it is you need to do next.
At its best, Bye Sweet Carole is a condescendingly easy puzzle game. At its worst, it’s one long cutscene that asks you to occasionally mash the spacebar or hold the right arrow key for a while. The animation is, of course, beautiful and worth experiencing, but it prompts the question: why wasn’t this a movie?
While I love games with a good story and I definitely think video games can be a great medium for storytelling, I am often one to say that a good game can’t just be a good story. Similarly, Bye Sweet Carole suffers for its decision to be a highly animated game rather than a film. What was surely a genius idea to the developer actually turns out to be a recipe that fights itself; the slow, rather boring gameplay feels like a tedious interruption from the animated story, and the focus on animation with no gameplay to back it up disappoints those who were looking to play a game, leaving the fantastic animation feeling more like a gimmick.
Bye Sweet Carole is an incredible animation. For that alone, it’s worth experiencing. When the game is at its best, you could consider it a rather cozy and incredibly accessible puzzle game designed to tide you over between frequent and entertaining animations. However, the animation does all of the heavy lifting in this title, leaving a game that is actually rather boring and tedious as a game. This is a sentiment that began to rise from players who experienced the demo, and not one that’s going to change when they play the full version.
Ironically, I feel like Bye Sweet Carole will face the same fate as animated films such as The Black Cauldron and Anastasia: not well-received critically and rather unpopular at launch, but developing a cult following regardless.
The Final Word
Bye Sweet Carole is an incredible work of art and animation, one worth experiencing on its artistic merits alone. As a game, however, it leaves much to be desired, failing to innovate with its shallowest of mechanics. It is a game that plays slow when it plays at all and likely would have done better as a film.
Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of Bye Sweet Carole. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Bye Sweet Carole is available on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch.
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