BYE, SWEET CAROLE is a dark tribute to old school Disney

I recently played Little Sewing Machine’s new indie game: Hello, sweet Carole. This adventure is a dark mystery where you play as Lana investigating what happened to her friend Carole Simmons, a resident of the Bunny Hall orphanage who went missing.

The graphics are beautiful and although it’s marketed as a horror game, I’d really call it horror lite at best. Overall, I liked the game, although there were some drawbacks.

Let’s start with some negatives. The controls were the hardest, feeling a little slippery at times. I will say that I played on Steam Deck, so other platforms may not have the same issues. Navigating the stairs was challenging, to go up the stairs you had to push yourself up and to the side to start going up them, but sometimes it worked and sometimes you went up them automatically.

Generally it wasn’t a problem, until you were running away from a monster looking for a place to hide and started running up the stairs instead of under them to the hideout. Additionally, it was inconsistent with controls to stop interacting with an object. For example, you will have to use the cranks to move objects, pressing the interact button again will end your interaction with the crank.

However, the interaction button is also used to jump and grab objects to knock down, and pressing the button again will not cause you to fall, instead you will have to push down to fall to the ground and continue. These aren’t game breaking issues for me, but they did get a little frustrating.

Now, as far as the positives go, the graphics, music, voice acting, and story are all well done for this game. I really liked the homage to early Disney. It helped make the monsters seem more otherworldly as we generally don’t see these types of monsters in Disney films.

I was also really impressed with the music, which again is an homage to old school Disney films and worked really well. I particularly liked the end credits song sung by Elsie Lovelock who also voices the main character Lana.

The game’s music isn’t particularly exciting, but it does a good job of creating the atmosphere of the different game areas. But the music during cutscenes is where it really shines. The entire cast did a really great job voicing their roles and I always appreciate when games like this are fully voiced.

The story for Hello, sweet Carole It’s truly a journey. I don’t want to reveal too much because I think it’s worth playing and finding out for yourself. But suffice it to say, it’s ultimately a story about dealing with grief and loss.

Many parts reminded me of this Alice in Wonderlandbut you can really see the influences of Snow White AND Cinderella even at different points in the story. It really hit me emotionally in the end, so the reward for everything was earned. The events are truly a journey and made me wonder how much was real and how much was imaginary and whether in the end there was a real difference between these things.

Overall, I really liked it Hello, sweet Carole. It’s not very long, but it’s a fun and creepy game. While there were some hiccups in the actual game, I’d say it’s worth playing. I would give it a 7/10. You can get the game on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series XLS, and Steam.