Thank you Maximum Entertainment for sending us a review code!

Have you ever tasted something that defied description? You try to describe the flavor to the people around you, but all you can really do is look puzzled while you dig into another bite, if only in an attempt to allow your mind to settle on a feeling other than bafflement? That is how I feel trying to tell you about Bye Sweet Carole.

Bye Sweet Carole is an enigma. It's an adventure game with minor platforming aspects, quick-time events (QTEs), and survival-horror elements. It's a dark game animated like an honest-to-goodness Disney movie. It's Alice in Wonderland if it were a tragedy. It simultaneously tells a sad and gripping story that is very personal to the main character while simultaneously trying to tell a story about the women's suffrage movement of the early 20th century. It will throw tragedy at you and then ask you to dance or swing an umbrella like a sword at monstrous rabbits immediately after. And all the while, the beautiful hand-drawn imagery coupled with the orchestral music in the background brings each moment to life, only to question whether one of the characters in the cutscene is voiced by AI (they aren't).

Let's start with the story. Bye Sweet Carole centers around the protagonist Lana, a nearly-adult women whose parents are dead by the opening of the story, leaving Lana in the care of the Bunny Hall orphanage for girls. Lana's only friend in the orphanage, a same-aged girl named Carole, has recently gone missing, and Lana takes it upon herself to investigate her disappearance and find out what really happened. The game constantly switches between clear reality and dark Wonderland-esque unreality, where Lana can freely change into the form of a rabbit to help solve puzzles, and where she is often beset by monstrous creatures. The chiefest of these is the tall, bent man known as Mr. Kyn, who can shapeshift and terrorize Lana in a multitude of ways. In these unreal spaces, she occasionally receives help from an equally-bizarre ally called Mr. Baesie, who tells Lana she is the princess of the rabbit kingdom of Corolla and that Kyn needs her to relinquish her title in order to take the kingdom over for himself. It is up to the player to help Lana find her way through real and unreal puzzles, evade monsters, and solve the mystery of Carole's disappearance and protect the kingdom of Corolla.

The whole story takes place in England in the early 20th century. The suffrage movement is a frequent topic of conversation amongst the girls of the orphanage and becomes the background plot point for the duration of the game. Newspaper articles showing the suffragettes in handcuffs and being arrested appear frequently. During cutscenes, the girls often talk about how limiting their current lives are, knowing that they will have little to no prospects if they can't get a man to marry them when they come of age. At one point, one of the girls says of the men in their society, "To THEM...we are just THINGS." During a ball hosted by the Bunny Hall near the end of the game, Lana sees all of the men only as if they are black, felt-covered mannequins.

This secondary part of the story is the major reason Bye Sweet Carole leaves me feeling conflicted. I have written and re-written this paragraph multiple times, because even as I explain my feelings, they change. On the one hand, some of the main characters are very much influenced by the suffrage movement. At times, however, it feels very heavy-handed. For the chronically-online gamers out there, the ones who can barely escape the online culture war, the way that almost all of the men are portrayed as literal nobodies or, in many cases, as monsters, is going to leave a sour taste in some people's mouths. Maybe this is just meant to portray how some people at the time felt, or a commentary on how unfairly women were treated in society at that time, but the game almost feels preachy sometimes. I can't tell if it's just trying to portray these fictional girls' feelings or make some kind of political statement. Because of that, it actually takes away from the far more emotional main story. Without spoiling anything, when I reached the part of the game where the player is finally given the full story of what happened, it was heart-wrenching. The main plot is sad and thought-provoking all on its own. Having the suffragist movement as the backdrop and a motivating factor in the girls' decisions throughout the game is one thing; having all the men at a ball turn into raging monsters or having Lana shout, "After all, you're nothing more than any ordinary man!" at one of the unreality monsters before beheading them feels like the game is trying to hammer home some point instead of just letting the main emotions of the story take center stage.

With my conflicted feelings about the story finally put to a very wordy rest, we can talk about the actual gameplay. Bye Sweet Carole recommends playing with a controller. Essentially, you move Lana around 2D side-scrolling environments while inspecting and interacting with various objects. While in human form, Lana can only jump if she has something to climb up onto, but she can jump freely and even wall jump while in bunny form. The game is broken up into 10 chapters, each area encompassing a series of rooms to explore with various puzzles. Completing the puzzles will carry the story along and move Lana to the next environ. Mr. Baesie is also controllable in some chapters; pressing a button will switch control from Lana to Baesie. Baesie is some kind of inhuman "thing" that can remove his head and allow it to move around separately from his body. The head can be squished, lit on fire, or electrified to solve various puzzles. During chase scenes or when Lana is in danger, the player may be required to complete a quick-time event to prevent her from coming to harm. I was never a big point and click adventure fan, but this format was pretty enjoyable overall. The simple playstyle makes the game easy to pick up and suits the art style very well. There were some points, particularly in the early chapters, where the game would take away player control to show them some animation, but then not make it very clear once the player had control again; I died a few times for failing QTEs or not running away fast enough during these moments. It's a small complaint and not a problem most of the time.

Bye Sweet Carole's true claim to fame is the animation: It looks like a classic Disney film. The love and attention to detail that went into the designs and set pieces is apparent in every moment of the game. A cynical person may look at the game's website and think that the images and clips are not representative of the actual game, but it is. In a word, it's beautiful.

The music is no slouch here, either. While the music during typical gameplay is subtle, it never fails to convey the general feeling of the trials Lana is experiencing, usually in the form of mild dread or danger. It ramps up whenever Lana is being chased or in harm's way. During cutscenes, the music swells up and enhances the mood perfectly. The cherry on top is Lana's voice actor singing the closing song during the end credits. A couple of the secondary voice actors sound a bit wooden, but this is usually far overshadowed by the main characters' extraordinary acting. I particularly love Mr. Kyn's delivery and whatever effects they did to his voice to get him to sound the way he does; he is proper menacing in all the right ways.

There are, however, some concerns regarding the game's stability. In the 2 weeks since the official launch, there have been a number of patches to fix bugs that were present on release. I experienced a few of these myself, such as one time where Mr. Baesie just fell off the edge of the map and into the off-screen abyss; I had to reload the game to save him. I also got several Steam achievements for things I didn't do, like "Fail every dance sequence" (I had just failed the third one I tried) or "Don't make a single mistake for every dance sequence" (I had just completed the second dance sequence without a mistake). There was an issue with a monster that was chasing me just getting stuck on the wall, and another issue where a dumbwaiter that could be cranked up and down could actually be cranked up past where its topmost spot was supposed to be and then couldn't be cranked back down. The voice acting doesn't always match the subtitles. Finally, there are a couple puzzles that you cannot solve without having first inspected the correct object that gives you the answer, even if the answer is simple or could be easily brute-forced. There is one point where you need to find the right combination to a lock that only has 64 possible answers, but the game will not let you solve the lock unless you've already found the correct combination written on a specific note you can pick up. As I said, the development team is releasing patches, so hopefully these will all be addressed in the coming weeks.

Of course, with the game having the survival-horror aspects and taking place in a setting where the men are almost all portrayed as misogynist monsters, there are a number of moral concerns to take into consideration if you're thinking of picking up the game for yourself. Violence is common, though usually relatively mild. For example, Lana can fall off ledges and will either disappear in a screen-wipe animation or will simply collapse on the ground. If she is crushed, she just disappears in a poof before being returned to her previous location. There are a few exceptions, however, usually involving Mr. Kyn. His first appearance involves him snatching up a passing rabbit, breaking its neck, and snacking on it. He later is able to shape-shift into the other girls at the orphanage and terrorizes Lana by having them die in horrific ways, like falling from several stories up. When Lana reaches their "corpse", it will suddenly spring to life with an evil grin and attack Lana. There is also a death animation that involves Lana catching fire and burning alive.

Foul language is relatively sparse; I caught one instance of "darn" and another of someone simply yelling "D**nation!" During the ball held during the final act of the game, a table is set up for roulette, which Lana must help a man win at in order to progress the game. During that same chapter, Lana is able to obtain an alcoholic drink. The bartender says he thinks young girls shouldn't drink because it makes them "flirtatious". Then Lana needs to drug the drink with tranquilizers and give it to a man in order to steal a key item. Said man was previously heard talking about how he was a great seducer and even managed to seduce Queen Victoria with his "virile dancing". One of the men there calls Lana a "bimbo". When the man she was getting ready to meet tries to forcefully detain her from leaving (after she makes a big scene about not letting the man who is courting her "tame me like a filly"), Mr. Baesie swoops in dressed as a woman to distract him so that Lana can escape.

The final issue of note is an implied lesbian relationship between two of the girls. It's never explicitly stated, but they refer to each other in letters as "My Sweet [X]", and during a cutscene where one of the girls is talking about the other, her voice swoons and the cutscene shows pink ribbons swooping around the other girl as the background fades to shades of pink.

Bye Sweet Carole is overall a good game. It's clear a lot of love and passion went into making it. Fans of adventure games will like its mechanics and puzzle solving, and fans of Disney aesthetic will absolutely love the art and music. The main plot surrounding Carole's disappearance and Lana's coming-of-age story is quite the emotional ride that suffers some from the heavy-handed way the women's suffrage movement is portrayed by the characters. The game does have some small bugs, but the developers are actively patching the game to iron them out. There are some moral considerations to take into account as well. If the moral considerations aren't enough to scare you away, then I can only say what I would say when I can't describe a dish's flavor: Try some for yourself; it's worth a taste.

-maestro_dana