CopyCat

Despite some troubled animations and controls, Copycat plays its emotional journey excellently. As a cat owner and someone who has lived somewhat similar events in recent times, its tale of love and loss hit hard, but was a journey worth taking.

Copycat is only about three hours in length and jumps between set pieces at a good pace, constantly switching up your tasks to prevent the game from becoming stale. You’ll wreak havoc in a house, roam neighborhoods and parks, sneak past guard dogs, hunt for food, fight off alley cats, and even chase animals as a panther in Dawn’s dreams, with no one set piece lingering too long. Despite its story which is purposefully uncomfortable to experience, it is an adventure well worth embarking on...

It’s a well rehearsed line from cat people that you don’t own a cat – instead they own you. Unlike a dog’s unending loyalty and affection, cats occupy your house and stereotypically seem to barely tolerate your presence, unless they’re after food of course. A pseudo-psychological reading could easily be made about what kind of relationship you prefer based on your choice of pet, but that’s outside the scope of this review. Copycat takes the idea of the feline/human dynamic and flips the script to see it through the cat’s eyes and ends up being a touching tale of belonging and rejection.

Everyone talks about how easy it must be to be a cat—lazing around in the sun, hacking up hairballs, and eating unlimited amounts of food. For free! But what about the cats that aren’t that lucky? In Copycat, developed by Spoonful Of Wonder and published by Neverland Entertainment and Nuuvem Inc., you play as Dawn, a shelter kitty who loses her home just as she gets used to being there.

Copycat is a game that tackles some serious issues, but its characters are hard to warm to and will make you angry at times. Still, being a cat and doing cat things can be fun, despite clunky controls and unspired gameplay.

For a three-hour adventure title, Copycat has something meaningful to say about mental health and relationships, yet it can be too often undercut by its rigid design, story happenings that don't make sense, and the overarching feeling that with more time, polish and backing there's an even greater game trying to burst out here. It's a pleasant and fine game for how short it is in spite of its gratuitous repetition, and deserves kudos for being adequately designed by two people, it's also in need of some significant refinement.