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 perfectly encapsulates the feeling of self-doubt, fear and hesitance that comes with building a close relationship with another individual. Although the narrative is told through the eyes of a cat, its message is universal and urges players to accept love and nurture one another regardless of differences. The technical side of the game was buggy at certain parts of the story during my playthrough, but the game truly flourishes when it centers around storytelling.

Copycat is the debut title from Australian-Ukranian duo Spoonful of Wonder, made up of Samantha Cable and Kostia Liakhov. It’s an emotional, narrative-driven game where you play as Dawn, a shelter cat adopted by an aging woman named Olive. It’s a short and tightly controlled experience, and while you’re occasionally presented with choices, they don’t make an impact on the direction of the story. It goes to some dark and unexpected places, and left a huge impact on me – but it also l...

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.

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.