At PAX Australia 2023, Copycat stood out in the Indie Showcase section anytime I walked past it, seeing players jumping around and wrecking a house as a cat. I eventually went hands-on and had fun with that as well, but what was evident by the end of that demo was that this game was going to have something deeper within it, and that’s the story of a cat and its owner.
At the start of this narrative paw-walker, you’ll choose from one of a few different cats to adopt and learn that Olive, an older lady, has recently lost her cat named Dawn. Here, she is picking out a new cat that looks very similar to Dawn. To name the new cat, Dawn. But this new Dawn isn’t her old cat that’s been lost, as this Dawn dreams of being a wildcat. In the early mini-games, you’ll see this with Dawn playing with a cat toy that, thanks to her imagination, turns into a real fish she is capturing in a stream. As she explores the backyard, she imagines running wild and free. And when stuck indoors, a voice in her head that matches that of a nature documentarian pushes her to wreck and do as she pleases in the house because she is, and should be, able to do so as a wildcat.
The pairing of Dawn and the voice in her head is funny as Dawn struggles to capture something as simple as a butterfly. But things take a sad turn when Olive has a health issue, and her daughter evicts Dawn from the house, leaving her to find a way to get back to her new home.
For the first 15-20 minutes of this 2-3 hour game, Dawn dreams of escape and running free, only to want to return to this house and Olive as she’s become quite attached. Pairing that with Olive’s fight for her own freedom while growing older and having her daughter step in to help/make choices for her mother, there’s a thematic backing of asking the players, ‘What makes a home?’ And exploring our abilities to break free from any preconceed notions and choices that might be made for us in life based on choices out of our own control.
I found the journey with Dawn to have more emotional depth than I would have considered coming into the game. Even if the pacing is off and the game doesn’t quite land, it’s ending how it might want to; I still enjoyed the journey.
With that said, there are some clunky gameplay mechanics here piecing all of this together. While the animations of Copycat at PAX might not have bothered me, now, in the full release, I found them quite choppy, especially for a game in which the cat is supposed to be practising to be a smooth and efficient wildcat. The mini-games also get repetitive and tedious as the game continues, and in particular, the three on-rails running sections and an obnoxious platforming section threw off my enjoyment of the game up until those moments.
It’s obvious that the duo behind the Australian developer Spoonful of Wonder wanted to make a narrative game first and foremost, and that’s the strongest part of Copycat, but I enjoyed the game more as a paw-walker/walking sim than a cat exploration or sim game.
(Review code provided to Explosion Network.
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