BYE, SWEET CAROLE Is A Dark Tribute To Old School Disney

I recently played through the new indie game from Little Sewing Machine: Bye, Sweet Carole. This adventure is a dark mystery where you play as Lana investigating what happened to her friend Carole Simmons, a resident of the orphanage Bunny Hall who has gone missing.

The art is beautiful and though it is marketed as a horror game, I would really call it horror lite at best. Overall, I enjoyed the game, though there were a few drawbacks.

Let’s start with some of the negatives. The controls were the most difficult, sometimes they felt a little slippery. I will say that I played on the Steam Deck, so other platforms may not have the same issues. Navigating stairs was challenging, to go upstairs you needed to push up and to the side to start going up them, but sometimes this would work and sometimes you would just automatically go up them.

Generally it wasn’t a problem, until you were running from a monster looking for a place to hide and you start running up the stairs instead of under them to the hiding place. It was also inconsistent with the controls to stop interacting with an object. For example, you will need to use cranks to move objects, pressing the interact button again will end your interaction with the crank.

However, the interact button is also used to jump and grab things to pull down and pressing the button again will not make you drop, instead you need to push down to fall to the ground and continue. These aren’t game breaking problems for me, but they did get a little frustrating.

Now for the positives, the art, music, voice acting, and story are all well done for this game. I really enjoyed the homage to early Disney. It helped make the monsters feel more otherworldly since we don’t generally see these kinds of monsters in the Disney movies.

I was also really impressed with the music, again as an homage to old school Disney movies it worked really well. I particularly enjoyed the end credits song sung by Elsie Lovelock who also voices the main character Lana.

The in game music isn’t too exciting, but it does well at establishing the ambience of the different play areas. But the music during the cutscenes are where it really shines. The whole cast did a really good job with voicing their roles and I always appreciate when games like this are fully voiced.

The story for Bye, Sweet Carole is really a trip. I don’t want to give too much away because I do believe it is worth playing through and finding out for yourself. But suffice to say, it is ultimately a story about dealing with grief, and loss.

Many parts reminded me of Alice in Wonderland, but you can really see the influences of Snow White and Cinderella at different story points too. It really hit me emotionally at the end so the payoff for everything is earned. The events are really a trip though and left me wondering how much was real and how much was imaginary and if there was a real difference between those things at the end of the day.

Overall, I really enjoyed Bye, Sweet Carole. It’s not super long, but it’s a fun, spooky little game. While there were a few drawbacks with actual game play, I would say it’s worth playing. I would give it a 7/10. You can get the game on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series XlS, and Steam.