Review: Bye Sweet Carole (Nintendo Switch)

Pitched as a love letter to classic animation, Bye Sweet Carole is an incredibly pretty game to look at. From the very first frames, it is evident that a lot of love and effort has been devoted to the stylistic choices in a way that makes the artwork shine. However, few other elements of the game match up to the same standard.

Set in an early 1900s orphanage against a backdrop of women’s suffrage, you play as a young girl whose friend Carole has mysteriously disappeared. In your investigations to find out what happened to her, you encounter supernatural beings that stalk the halls of the building.

The gameplay takes the form of a 2D puzzle platformer with elements of stealth-survival tactics. You explore the labyrinthine floors of the orphanage searching for clues, flipping switches to unlock new areas of the home and avoiding the nightmarish monsters plaguing the corridors. There are interesting mechanics to help you navigate covertly, from ducking into cupboards and holding your breath to transforming into a rabbit to squeeze through small gaps or leap over high obstacles.

Bye Sweet Carole is a fairly slow-paced game. At some points this lends to the sense of tension. The breath-holding mechanic is interesting, but under-utilised as most monsters are either easy to circumnavigate or frustratingly unavoidable with very little middle ground. At other times, the slow pace reduces the sense of tension as you seem to be strolling around the house with a sense of easy leisure rather than a frantic search. The sluggish pace is compounded by somewhat clunky invisible barriers making the world more awkward to navigate than it should be.

For the most part, Bye Sweet Carole’s flaws are forgivable for a game that prioritises its visual design and storytelling first and foremost. However, the predominant issue with this game is that it crashed at a specific point midway through and there is no way to avoid it. You reach a specific monster encounter and are confronted with the option of being eaten and respawning moments before, or the game crashing completely.

This essentially renders the game unplayable, with no way to get to the ending and the resolution to Carole’s disappearance. The developers have claimed that this is a known issue they are working on. However, this far past release with no patch in sight, the compelling aspects of the game have long since lost their shine. The game is already available on other platforms and it doesn’t make sense that the studio would expect people to pay full price for half a game on Switch and have to wait for an ending, when the exact same thing (but complete) is available elsewhere.

It would have been nice to see how Bye Sweet Carole played out, but it is ultimately undermined by the lazy business practice of releasing a game before its game-breaking issues are fixed.