Everyone remembers the first animated movie that scared them. For me, it was The Fox and the Hound — probably not the first movie in Disney’s canon that anyone remembers, but it was one of my brother’s favourites, so it was on regular rotation. Which means that the bear attack towards the end of the movie has been etched into my memory. It’s a terrifying scene which probably explains why I haven’t rewatched it since childhood.
Chris Darril, director of the upcoming narrative horror-platformer Bye Sweet Carole, understands the impact of those animated movies and the effect they have on kids. It’s this, along with a healthy dose of nostalgia and passion for animation, that fuels the entire game.
The Disney-inspirations of Bye Sweet Carole are plain to see; very frame of the game looks like it comes from the Don Bluth era of animation — and Darril himself adores movies.This love of the cinema comes from his greatest inspiration, his mother, who sadly passed away from cancer in 2021. “[Bye Sweet Carole] was conceived when I lost my mum. I needed, at the time, to link myself to that child that I was years ago.”
One movie trip Darril speaks about fondly in interviews is Beauty and the Beast, and he tells me he saw when he was around three years old at the time, on a call a week before the release date trailer, “[My mum] told me that she never imagined that such a young boy could ever be so calm at the cinema… But there I was really calm, I was dreaming, watching this stuff.”
Bye Sweet Carole is a homage to that era of animation — a “homage to all the people that grew up with the Disney classics, with Don Bluth’s animation, but also Bluth’s experimental video game Dragon’s Lair, and a lot of other games that used to have this hyper-detailed animation.” And, visually, it could easily slip in with the rest of that era.
Break and rebuild
At this point, Darril is best known for the Remothered series, of which there are two games and a graphic novel. But, following the release of Remothered: Broken Porcelain and the loss of his mother, Darril decided to leave Stormind Games, the studio behind the series and the company he was a partner of: “I was not absolutely happy, not satisfied… you know when there is this strange feeling of bad air around and you feel like you can’t breathe? At the time I lost my ambition.”
“‘Is this doable? Are you sure?’ [laughs]”
Initially, a new game wasn’t in Darril’s future, he tells me, “I was really feeling really sad, of course, for a really important part of my life, I decided that I wanted to rest a little.” He took a hiatus in Malta, where he rediscovered his spark thanks to a friend’s discovery online — a build of Darril’s first project, Remothered 2D.
“[Remothered 2D] was a game that I started developing alone, on RPG Maker XP… that changed my life forever because I started working in the film industry and then I caught the interest and the curiosity of video gamers, players, and other companies.” That original build that put him on the map went missing, until his friend stumbled upon it online.
When he got hold of the build, Darril recalls having a renewed passion, a mix between “excitement, ambition” he says. “So I told myself, take this build — I know it’s really old, because it was about 2009 and 2010 — do an HD remaster. But then I wrongly deactivated a layer on Photoshop and this frame, completely flat, popped out from my screen and I said to myself, ‘oh my gosh, the palette, the general aesthetics remind me of the colors of Snow White.’“
With this mistake, Darril says that he was inspired to experiment — “not only in terms of game design, but also in terms of art direction” — to create a game inspired by the classic animated movies he grew up watching. When he formed his studio Little Sewing Machine, he recalls saying to his team “‘Is this doable? Are you sure?’ [laughs]”
Frame-by-frame
Hand-drawn animation is well known to be a difficult medium to work with — an extreme example comes from Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-nominated movie, The Wind Rises, in which a single four-second scene took 15 months to animate. So the question above seems reasonable.
And Darril says that it’s even more difficult for video games, because “you have a lot of variabilities.” Cuphead –which is inspired by rubber-hose animation — took five years to make. Hollow Knight, Spiritfarer, Skullgirls, and upcoming titles like Mouse: P.I. for Hire and The Eternal Life of Goldman all (likely) follow similar meticulous, loving processes.
“If you’re just watching a movie — like Beauty and the Beast, Studio Ghibli’s animation, The Iron Giant — you’re going to watch that movie and the movie will be just that, without any alternatives.” But for games, Darril and the team had to consider much, much more: on a character simply falling over, you have to consider how they’re moving — are they walking, running? Are they tripping to the ground? How far are they falling?
“So you have to do thousands of extra animations just to anticipate an action by another player.” And this was just for the main character, “Every frame was drawn every time.” Darril tells me “Of course we have a few frames that you recycle, but every time you make a mistake, you have to redo the whole animation from scratch.”
But the work is more than worth it, and Darril can’t praise the team enough: “They did miracles” he says multiple times throughout our chat. “I really feel that there’s something beneath those wonderful illustrations, those wonderful environments… And there’s something which has a kind of magic that I cannot find elsewhere in any other project. This is why I make video games.”
Childhood horrors
The Disney-style animation may have been technically demanding for the team, but it was clearly the way to go for a game with horror elements. Darril’s goal was to capture those feelings people had when watching Disney movies for the first time — not just the horrifying, though that was a big part of it.
Which is where contradiction comes in. When you first look at the game, Darril says “You feel like in your comfort zone because you see the nice visuals, you see the little birds, Lana in her gown, and then something happens and feels so out of place.”
And there’s something which has a kind of magic that I cannot find elsewhere in any other project.
The horrors couldn’t come from the typical avenues — ” we didn’t want any gore, we didn’t want anything exaggerated, because… Bye Sweet Carol is an allegory about bullies, about the emancipation of women, so we didn’t want to speculate on the typical horror contents, the stream of violence.”
When I asked more about his intentions to invert expectations, Darril compared it to the Creepypasta phenomenon, using the example of Piglet’s Big Game (yes, really), which many have compared to Clock Tower 3 or Silent Hill thanks to its foreboding music and specific camera angles (yes, really). Darril himself even remembers playing the demo and thinking the same things.
But he also feels that animation, naturally, lends itself to horror more easily, bringing up Courage the Cowardly Dog as another example. He goes further to say that “I think that the closest thing to the horror media in general is the animation, because it speaks to your inner child, to your deepest feelings, traumas, memories.
“It’s pretty common that if you watch a movie, and it’s an animated movie, if there’s a topic about something that really touches you, it’s way more common that you’re going to cry at the end of the movie… And the horror is the same.”
Bunny Hall and Corolla are deliberately designed to invoke all of those unsettling memories and destroy your comfort zone. “There are a lot of scenes set in the bathroom, the bedroom, because those areas are where you feel really comfortable… So when those [are breached] there are no more boundaries; when the enemies, the evil, whatever it is, enters your comfort zone, you’re completely lost.”
‘Votes for Women!’
Darril has spent much of his career focusing on women’s stories, and Bye Sweet Carole really puts the importance of women — and women’s history — first and foremost by setting it at the time of the women’s suffrage movement. Why?
It’s a question the creator has been asked before, as recently as an event a few weeks prior to our chat — “‘why should a grown man tell a story about women’s rights?'” He recalls he was also approached on a train while reading The Scarlet Letter. The novel, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, follows a woman who has a child out of wedlock and is forced to wear a big scarlet letter as punishment. “‘Why should a man read The Scarlet Letter?'”
Darril has the same response to both of these people — “Why shouldn’t a man read a specific book? Why shouldn’t a man fight for other people’s rights?”
Women’s rights are particularly personal for Darill as she was fascinated with stories of women’s emancipation: “My mum was really in love with the story of the 20th century… I fell in love when she was telling me about Emmeline Pankhurst, Harriet Tubman, or Rosa Parks. All these women that, in a moment where they really risk everything, they throw a little rock into the ocean and they make a tsunami.”
I fell in love when she was telling me about of Emmeline Pankhurst, Harriet Tubman, or Rosa Parks
“What my mother taught me was really important, telling something that probably I couldn’t relate yet at the time because I was too childish, I was still a teen at the time.” But it still had a profound effect on the creator, so he spent the studying and honing his knowledge because he wanted the game to be “a homage to my mum and my childhood.”
But Darill was also conscious that he was putting a woman’s story, a woman’s narrative, at the front of a horror game; “It was important not to exaggerate too much because I didn’t want to make anyone or anything a laughing stock.” His focus was to make it “unsettling” because in some parts of the world, it’s still difficult to talk about “women’s rights and human rights in general.”
Sounds scary
That unsettling feeling goes beyond the darker, cartoon-esque visuals and thematic concerns, as it should for a horror game. Remothered composer Luca Balboni is once again working with Darril, and the pair spent a lot of time nailing the feel of the music.
“It was pretty hard,” he laughs, recalling his and Balboni’s process “we basically rewatched the oldest classics by Disney — so Snow White, Cinderella, Peter Pan, and the oldest movie by Bluth. The latter was most helpful because a lot of Bluth’s movies were really scary like The Secret of NIMH or the rats in Lady and the Tramp.”
“We watched those scenes thousands of times and I had a clear idea that we needed to try and reproduce this kind of specific melodic structure and instruments that were used between the ’30s and the ’60s.” While the animation style took inspiration from across the generations, Darril was more keen to avoid the musical trappings of Disney’s more-modern output.
In particular, he pointed to Frank Churchill’s score from Snow White — “The music doesn’t just describe [the Evil Queen] Grimhilde, it describes what is happening all around. The world changes at the same time as this beautiful queen who turns into an evil old lady just to kill her worst enemy because she’s jealous of her.”
It’s telling from the trailers alone that Balboni seems to have nailed that feel so far, with the music ranging from bouncy and strange to unsettling and dramatic. There’s even a ballad-style song. And it all ties into what Little Sewing Machine is trying to do with Bye Sweet Carole.
“An artisan of feelings”
Darril is extremely passionate about Bye Sweet Carole, and understandably so — but early on in our chat, he was adamant about one thing in particular: “I don’t care about the sales.”
“Knowing there could be someone at the end of the game who says ‘I’m going to miss those characters. I’m going to miss everything there.’ And then in about a few months, ‘I’m going to replay it to experience the game again.’” – this is what drives Darril’s passion.
“Feelings command people, the world.”
As we wrapped things up, we circled back to that passion: “I don’t consider myself an artist, I consider myself an artisan of feelings because I really like to share what I feel.” His work isn’t about explicit messages or making something universally relatable, he wants to “speak to a specific community.”
“If you can speak to those specific people who really relate to the things you have to say, the things you want to say, I think that’s the biggest change you can make…. Okay, of course I want to make a game that people could enjoy [laughs]…but at the same time, that has never been my target. I do this because I love to do this.”
Moving from the Remothered series to a more independent studio has only strengthened Darril’s convictions: “You cannot push people to create art if that art is not ready… This is why I’m independent. This is why I decided to speak, to tell my stories.”
But there’s one thing in particular that Darril said that has stuck with me since our chat — “Feelings command people, the world.” Bye Sweet Carole has clearly been developed with feelings — from Darril’s childhood, from his love of movies, his mother, of the process of creation — but also, he wants the game to evoke feelings from players.
“I would really love [Bye Sweet Carole] to stick deeply in other people’s skin, in the players’ skin.” And he tells me people are already “hungry for more content.”
“There’s people already in cosplay as Lana. That’s the biggest achievement for a creator. Absolutely.” It sounds like Bye Sweet Carole may already be sticking, then. Let’s hope it brings back all of those childhood horrors.
This interview has been edited.
Thank you to Chris Darril for taking the time to speak with me, and to Maximum Games for arranging this interview. Bye Sweet Carole launches on Switch on 9th October 2025. Let us know if you’re looking forward to the game in the comments.
