Bye Sweet Carole

I think I have a new hobby: complaining to ChatGPT about games I liked but not quite, and figuring out why exactly that was. This text will not be a direct transcript of YouTube video review that I have posted on Bye Sweet Carole, but more of a deeper investigation into why I have almost refunded it, and why I never came back to replay it again and get remaining achievements.

I left a positive review for it on Steam, and I'm generally happy this game exists and happy to have it in my library, but it's also unlikely I will launch it ever again.

The good things

I will reiterate here, that I'm happy stories like Bye Sweet Carole are made these days. Stories that speak particularly about horror that women live through day to day via symbolic means. One absolutely visceral game of the kind is Silent Hill F, yet another game I will not play due to abundance of combat. But I've watched gameplays and videos with symbolism analysis extensively. And for me Bye Sweet Carole stands very near to it.

It speaks of this particular time in life of a very young girl where she has to bid farewell to her childhood, and is becoming aware that her body may be an object of desire. And she, all of herself, may be considered an object to be traded off, a commodity. Not all men are monsters, but older men ogling extremely young girls, such as girls in the game, feel like monsters to these girls. It's very reasonable that they are portrayed this way, as sticky hungry monsters, and girls become just rabbits, prey, meat.

That whole experience is scary. That grown up world with these new types of interactions and responsibilities is scary. Adulthood feels suffocating, and all you want is just keep playing silly games, running kites into the air and laughing. But then the time itself is taking this from you. Your friends may be growing a bit quicker than you, and drifting away. So you grow to fear the time itself and the changes it brings.

This period of transition from a girl into a woman, and the horror that follows along is very real and familiar to every woman. This exact horror is portrayed in Bye Sweet Carole very well, and though some characters are little bit flat, we should remember it's all inside a mind of a teenage girl. Teenagers are known to see world as extremely black and white, without any subtle hues.

Bye Sweet Carole and Silent Hill F, are both very good conveying that horror of becoming a woman. Silent Hill F concentrates more on the fear of losing your own identity, and Bye Sweet Carole is more about losing those who are dear, but it's the same period, same transition, same horror. The horror of womanhood to come.

The bad things

Same with the transition from a girl to a woman, this game is best experienced only once, and there's not much replay value in Bye Sweet Carole. Even such an avid achievement hunter as I am, I couldn't make myself play it again. Why? I am to blame the unique combination of genres Bye Sweet Carole has and requirement to switch different modes of playing way too often. More often than it is comfortable.

Bye Sweet Carole is trying to be a cinematic platformer with light stealth mechanics and a narrative driven point and click adventure at the same time. Platformer and stealth demand timing and spatial awareness, vigilance, threat anticipation. While adventure and narrative require patience, observation, and emotional attention. These perception modes are very different and switching between them is not easy or cheap cognitively, that is why the game feels so tiring to play.

Just as you get into observation and slow puzzle solving... you die because you have walked onto a ledge where you need to have a balance challenge and you couldn't switch from rabbit into human fast enough. You try to get into platforming flow by running and jumping... and you're attacked by enemies because apparently you have to be moving very slowly in order not to attract them. You decide to play as a rabbit because that is just so much faster... and as rabbit you are killed instantly, and have to restart.

Retries break story. Stealth slows flow. Mechanical failure interrupts immersion. Whether you tune yourself into fast platformer mode, or slow exploration mode... you're punished by enemies all the time. Tension accumulates but never truly resolves. Repetition turns dread into irritation. In the end it merely feels like the game is torturing you. In an unpleasant way.

Mind the absence of standing on the edge animation. That makes platforming even worse than it already is. But even if they implement it, an enjoyable platformer still needs a snap feeling, satisfying sound effects, momentum feedback and micro-success dopamine reward. And you get none of those because Bye Sweet Carole is not really a platformer by definition, it's a point and click narrative adventure. All the platforming feels like an artificial obstacle to inflate gameplay time. Stress is not discharged by flawless execution, because you still largely don't know what to do or where to go puzzle wise, and player just remains in this constant state of anxiety.

But why isn't it enjoyable even as a point and click game? What makes those games truly fun is having way more interactable objects than are required for the story progression. You get sarcastic comments, pieces of lore and worldbuilding, and the story starts to feel immersive and complete. But in Bye Sweet Carole the only interactable objects are those that actually progress the game. And the rest of the world just feels... empty. If there were no enemies, this could be a thing of its own, that emptiness. But unfortunately there are, there are enemies to escape from in nearly every chapter.

The story compensates for all this tension the first time you play. You still want to find out how everything is explained, and how everything will end. But once you know that, and there are no multiple endings and variations of the story, it feels unjustified to expose yourself to this torture of a gameplay yet again.

In 99% of cases I would choose a game over a visual novel. But Bye Sweet Carole is that rare 1% where I can't help but wish it was a just visual novel, and not the game that it is.