Sometimes, all that’s needed to get me on board with a game is a succinct and emphatic art style that enchants you. Bye Sweet Carole, a classic Disney-esque art style 2D adventure horror game, is the latest example that hooked me. After a mere 15-minute demo of the game’s opening, it’s a release that’s certainly high on my wishlist priority in the coming months.
Bye, Sweet Carole takes place in the early 1900s and follows a young girl by the name of Lana, who’s called to a mysterious orphanage to follow the last trail of her best friend Carole and, before long, is in way over her head.
Following a climb over a fence into the mansion’s grounds, she’s suddenly traversing lands that don’t quite make sense. Falling through a hole in the ground, she finds herself in a swamp biome, full of Creepy crawlies and monsters not plausibly of this earth.
Wading through a thick black sludge lake, you’re pursued by a sticky, grimy monster that wears a top hat. As she takes refuge in half-broken trees and other higher up platforms between slow crawls through the lake, every animation of Lana and her pursuer is highly detailed, emphasising every step and struggle. You’re there in the moment with Lana, thanks to how the world and everything in it moves.
The same immersion and curiosity come from the colouring and style found within Bye, Sweet Carol. Lana is seemingly heavily inspired by the original Alice in Wonderland, only with jet black hair. Picture the Alice you see in EA and American McGee’s Alice Madness Returns, and you’ve more or less got her number, only less gothic.
Bye, Sweet Carole looks to simultaneously be inspired by point and click games and slow, atmospheric and moody 2D horror games. How you’re interacting with the environment, ensuring you look at points of interest in a specific order, almost feels like King’s Quest or Monkey Island. Marketing for the game even stresses it’s only going to feel more like this in full release, teasing collecting objects and inventory management.
Then the other half of this game feels like Limbo and Inside. It situates you in this grim, dark setting where you can only move so fast, even despite the many things hunting you relentlessly. Slowly pushing a box or similar object to the side to reach a higher platform, climbing a long wall of vines while a monster’s hot on your tail… the tension is high.
Bye, Sweet Carole is being written by talent that wrote for the Remothered series. While I admittedly was not all that much of a fan of those games, especially the sequel, I’m all in here, and nothing present here is turning me away. What’s on offer thus far is a moody and melancholic adventure in early 1900s Britain that I can’t wait to explore.
Bye Sweet Carole releases on October 9th for PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S. It’s quite enticing and exciting thus far, and one you’ll certainly want to keep an eye out for.
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Checkpoint Gaming was flown to Sydney as a guest of Maximum Entertainment for the purpose of this preview.
About the Author
Charlie Kelly
She/Her, They/Them
Charlie loves her video games as much as she loves dumb, charming JRPG protagonists: probably way too much. You can often catch her spending too much time being emotional over LGBT stories in games. She also thinks Yakuza 6 is the best one.
