Bye Sweet Carole

Written by Joseph Moorer on 11/2/2025 for PC  

There are people in the gaming world who own multiple copies of a game. Games like Grand Theft Auto 5, which has been out for three generations. Fallout is one of those games too. My penance comes at the hands of Dragon's Lair, Dragon's Lair 2: Time Warp, and Space Ace. I fell in love with these quarter-munching animated games when they first came out in the arcades. I remember sitting in an Electronics Boutique and watching the opening animation to Dragon's Lair 2 for hours. It was advertised for PC then. I now own these games on PC, DVD, Blu-Ray, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. I have yet to beat Dragon's Lair 2.

These games are the pioneers of quick time events, and watching a narrative play out as you do next to nothing. I thought I was getting that here, seeing the animation of Bye Sweet Carole. But I think I went down another rabbit hole. 

Maximum Games puts you in the beautifully hand drawn and animated hands of Lana, an orphan at Bunny Hall. The game is set in the early 1900's during the women's suffrage movement. I didn't get that outright, but the game eventually tells you. Lana is being led to the reasoning why her friend and only companion Carole left Bunny Hall without a goodbye or anything. I discovered real quick that this is less like Dragon's Lair and more like an escape room. Lana will collect clues, solve puzzles and avoid danger to find out what really happened to Carole. 

Controlling Lana is simple. She moves where you want her to go most of the time. She even has a little trot if you press and hold a button. If she has to climb something, or interact with something, a huge yellow prompt pops up to tell you what button to push. It's not instant, and a little clunky, because I guess I'm expecting to push the button I'm told to, and I have to wait for Lana to decide if she wants to execute the command, because she has to complete the animation of the previous command. If that makes any sense to you, then I don't have to keep explaining this. Input lag is the word I want to use, but I don't, because input lag is a hot button issue. 

There are also quick time events. The game goes back and forth between pushing one button, or mashing a button, and all these events are random. There's a balance mini game at random, where you have to push the right stick left or right to keep Lana on the ledge. There are a couple of pitfalls that I didn't notice until I fell in the same one at least three different times running from enemies. Lana does have a life bar, but the rate she takes damage is also random. Fall damage is also at random, and some because of transformations. 

Lana eventually gets the power to transform into a bunny. Get it, because Bunny Hall. Ok, that's not why, but that's what I'm sticking with to not ruin the story. With this transformation, Lana can hop/run faster, jump higher and further, and fit through smaller spaces. In turn, she also takes more damage. She's a cute but frail little bunny, so you don't want to stay this way for long.

Going back to fall damage, Lana can be pushed over bannisters and pushed off ledges, but the game will decide if she dies or not. I've fallen in two completely separate stages at the same height, and died in one, on several occasions. Sometimes the game lets you change to the bunny mid fall, and you negate fall damage. Don't ask me how I know this. I'm sure it's not really supposed to happen and could already be patched out by the time of this review. There are more transformations later in the game. We won't spoil them here. 

The main base of this game is puzzles. Every single level feels like an escape room. Throughout the game, you will find items that will automatically be added to your inventory. Interactions will be indicated by a question mark, or a yellow action tab. There will be a lot of back and forth, and Lana and the game will give you hints. Lana will even straight up say, "I bet if I had a screwdriver, I could loosen the screws to this plate and go through the grate to get to the other side."

You can, and will, combine some items to make other items. Do not be afraid of trying combinations that don't make sense. Yes, the orange drink goes into the martini glass with the sedatives with a lime. How else are you going to knock out the dude telling you he's the greatest gift to women. It's the 1800s, y'all. If you can't use an item anymore, Lana will toss it. Of course, I say that, with three items in my inventory at credits. Maybe I missed something. 

All that to say, this game is clearly not a platformer, and I don't know if I can use "side-scrolling action adventure" here. We've talked about the controls quick time events and puzzles, but then there's the action sequences. These action sequences are part "jump scares," part enemies called hunters.

The jump scares are usually side characters, or stage hazards that you didn't think could hurt you.  Hunters are larger-than-life creatures that are constantly looking for you. The game wants you to know that you can't fight hunters, and you have to hide from them by ducking into rooms and behind curtains. You also have to "hold your breath," but you can only do so for so long. The hunters are fast and appear like any horror movie being. There are some weird caveats here.

There were times I was able to avoid the hunters by simply ducking into spaces, even while they were right behind me. They also suffer from input lag, so, sometimes, I was able to run right past them. This also saw me get trampled in some animation bug, where every time Lana started her animation to get up, the hunter would swing again, but Lana would take the hit at the swing start up frame.

Yes, I got frame trapped in a non-fighting game.

In some instances, there's a cool death animation with these hunters, and it's gruesome. Sometimes Lana just falls into a heap. Boss fights are super simple, though, so no worries about that. Either way, it's autosaved. But even that is inconsistent. 

I am going to tell you about the mailboxes. When I ran into my first one, it was explained to me that it was used to send postcards. In no way did it explain that it was used as a checkpoint, let alone a save spot. It just didn't dawn on me that it was, in fact, a save spot. So when I was getting smacked around by Hunters, I would quickly run to that mailbox. While the quick save does an automatic save, the mailbox saves the progress you made with the puzzle. You're going to do a lot of running back and forth anyway trying to solve these puzzles, so take advantage. If you die, you just respawn. From where is up to the game. 

I have to give a little more credit to the animation. It is beautifully drawn. Every character, every creature, and every enemy looks like the animators deserved the accolades they received while the game's demo was available. I could be nitpicky and talk about the reused animations, or the looped animations when there's dialogue present, but I can't draw or animate. So, I'm going to shut up and just give credit where it's due.

It does remind me of mouthing the word "watermelon" when lip syncing. Try it. To any song. Just move your head and hands for emphasis. Thank me later. While the animation is very nice to look at, the sound here is pretty good too. The music cues when certain enemies enter the game kept me engaged. Go into the options to turn the sounds up. It's worth it. There is voice acting most of the time. 

The cutscenes are also fully animated, with voice acting. While there were important cutscenes you could skip, there were others you could not. There were also times where I wish I could skip some, but mostly replays. I do have one major grievance, and a little bit of a spoiler. At some point in the game, the ladies of Bunny Hall are told that if they are to be courted, they need to know how to dance. While the expectation here is a rhythm game, it was not. All you had to do was push a series of buttons and watch the characters on the screen do the absolute goofiest dances I've ever seen. Maybe I thought it would be slow dancing, or some sort of swing dancing. Neither of those things happened. 

I was very conflicted at the end of this game. I am torn between the message it was trying to convey, and the story it was trying to tell. The characters don't stick around enough to care for them, except for Josephine. It was also hard to tell who is the most terrible person in this game—and that includes the antagonist. It's hard to talk about in a spoiler free review, but the game has been out for a while now, so if you haven't looked into it, play through it, and see if we have the same thoughts. This happened to me in Sanabi, but Sanabi tore me down. This game let me down easy, and at the end I was kind of like, "Oh."

I'm glad I waited to post this. This review was stalled between my schedule and two patches. There will probably be more, as this game was full of bugs upon release. They weren't game breaking, but animations getting stalled, or pushing a button to make Lana complete the same sentence over and over with no ability to cancel. It started to get a little unnerving. I saw a video that said someone beat this in three hours. It took me 10. Another early demo video crossed a Disney cartoon with horror, and there weren't enough horror elements to let me agree with that assessment. I honestly don't know how I feel about it on the first playthrough. Maybe that's the replay value here. Maybe I will catch things I didn't before. Or maybe, since I already know the ending, and that's all I needed. It's no Dragon's Lair. That's my mistake. It's also billed as a survival game. That could also be a mistake.