Copycat Review

If you’re a long-time cat lover — or aspiring cat owner hoping the Cat Distribution System chooses you next — then chances are Spoonful of Wonder’s story-driven adventure game, Copycat has caught your eye. Playing as Dawn, a newly adopted shelter cat, we get to experience first-hand the strange adjustment period between leaving a rescue building and feeling safe in a new space. A good, loving forever home is all a pet can dream of, but it’s immediately clear that Dawn’s new owner, Olive, might not be up to the task of taking care of herself, let alone her new furry friend. For those accustomed to more light-hearted cat media, please note that the tale Spoonful of Wonder has crafted does touch on sensitive topics, such as family trauma and abandonment, which are mentioned as content warnings before starting the game. This review does discuss upsetting situations involving animals — please read with care.

While a majority of the game has us playing as Dawn, we begin our journey as Olive, walking through a cosy cat adoption centre alongside a shelter employee. Since the camera is set in first-person, we don’t see Olive just yet, but just from her voice, we can deduce that she’s elderly and perhaps ill, as a cough and blurry vision draw her to a temporary halt. The staff member asks a couple of pertinent questions like “Are you alright?” and “Didn’t you come in looking for a missing cat a few weeks ago?” — both of which yield deflective answers, but more on that later. I found Copycat’s opening to be very efficient, letting me feel an array of emotions and sympathy for Olive right from the get-go, and it wastes no time setting the stakes of her dwindling health. These first few minutes get even better when we come to the room with six cats, which is where we choose our Dawn, who we’ll be playing as from here on out. I personally opted for a black cat with striking eyes, but you also have the option of a beautiful calico, orange tabby, and more.

Copycat’s gameplay immerses you in its world with a ton of cat activities, as you get to climb trees, jump high distances, shove picture frames off countertops, and steal freshly cooked food, all of which is endlessly fun despite some clunky controls, like the jump feeling a bit weightless and floaty. There’s also a good amount of mini-games, from stalking birds or pawing at a toy while imagining we’re hunting for fish, which pop up all throughout the story but rarely feel repetitive. The only feature I felt overstayed its welcome was, ironically, the quick-time events, which have you press a sequence of buttons as a timer counts down. These were fine at the start with short sequences, but later on, you’re faced with multiple back-to-back QTEs that eventually have you press 10 to 14 buttons per event, which gets pretty redundant. I suspect those increasingly large sequences were a way to introduce some progression of difficulty, but I don’t think it really needed that uptick in challenge.

When I read “emotional rollercoaster” on Copycat’s Steam page, I knew the warm, cosy visual aesthetic and the whimsical nature of playing as a cat would inevitably be contrasted with tough narrative themes. The tight opening led me to believe that the story would be told with care, so I got ready for a good cry and heartbreak. What I experienced, however, was a poorly paced story that felt tonally disjointed and, disappointingly, it mishandled the serious topics it presented. Due to the nature of my gripes, I can’t help but go into spoilers for the rest of this review, so read at your own discretion.

We’re expected to root for Dawn and Olive’s budding relationship — that much is clear. To quote the game’s description again, “Two broken hearts mend one another and learn to beat as one.” The game fails to pull this off on several fronts, including poor character development and unfocused conflicts. Let’s talk characters first, though, as nearly every human in this game shows disdain or hate for cats, whether they have a side or main role in the narrative — this includes Olive, the kind elderly lady that we’re supposed to care about. At no point in the story did Dawn and this woman seem like a duo. Olive grows increasingly unlikeable with every piece of dialogue and action, and by the end, she’s committed unforgivable acts. If you like cats or any animal, you will not like Olive. I completed this title with the steadfast belief that any animal under her care is at risk of neglect and death, regardless of the game’s attempt to wrap a pretty bow over a narrative rife with traumatic events.

While we’re in the middle of Dawn struggling to adjust to her new home, Olive reveals that her other cat went missing recently, who was also named… Dawn. She explains that you look exactly like the first cat and requests that you two just pretend like you’re the original. You’re robbed of having your own name and identity, but considering Olive is unwell and grieving, this seems like a believable and redeemable flaw that we’d expect to see her overcome later on. What’s unbelievable is that Olive abandons Dawn (us) in the woods at the halfway point of the game with no food, no water, and no shelter, because the original Dawn returned, and we (looking exactly alike) got mixed up in a chaotic turn of events — hence the game’s title, Copycat. Olive’s daughter (who acts with seething hate for us and the first Dawn) is the main reason she can’t keep us both and come clean about the mix-up. It’s still horrifying regardless of the reason, needlessly horrifying, and one has to wonder why Olive wouldn’t take Dawn back to the shelter. At least she’d be safe there.

I was baffled that I then had to get Dawn back to Olive despite being left to starve and die in the middle of nowhere. Playing toward this goal was unsatisfying. While I think we’re supposed to be sympathetic toward Olive, judging by the game’s presentation of events, Copycat doesn’t show us her redemption, which is needed if we’re supposed to feel good by the time the credits roll. The ending is resolved primarily off-screen after Dawn completes her journey, and everything is all fine and dandy. But how? Why? For most of the game, Olive and Dawn aren’t even together, which is strange for a tale that’s supposed to be about hearts mending and “beating as one.”

Copycat leaves us with the message that no matter how terribly someone treats a pet, they’ll just keep coming right back with unconditional love; not only that, the message goes further to say that they should keep going back because that pet is “needed.” I’m worried about how this would speak to a younger audience or those struggling in their interpersonal relationships, as the entire last half of Copycat promotes undervaluing yourself and putting yourself in danger to be worthy of someone else’s love and acceptance. Dawn shouldn’t have shouldered the responsibility of being abandoned, nor should we have to see Olive get a happy ending she herself didn’t work to have.

On top of that, this story is cluttered with wild events that aren’t given a moment to breathe. In the span of my four-hour playthrough, the game explored Olive’s health struggles, Dawn’s desire to be a wild cat, Dawn’s conflicting desire to have a stable home, and the whole “copycat” issue. If that weren’t enough, the game quickly introduces and cuts away from a lot of awful acts with little care, showcasing nearly attempted matricide in one scene and throwing in a child’s traumatic story of his father abandoning him in the next. Every minute of gameplay felt like going from one horrendous moment to another, big or small. I get that the game wants to leave an emotional impact, but letting these scenes hang in the air is a lost opportunity to add meaning to them and flesh them out in a way that compliments the tale being told.

At this point, it might sound like I have nothing good to say about Copycat, but there were gameplay choices that I thought were interesting and creative. For instance, there are some chase sequences modelled off “endless runner” style games, and our perspective is constantly shifting from first and third person, which transforms the way we experience certain events. Spoonful of Wonder gives Dawn an internal narrator that sounds like someone doing a voice-over for a nature documentary, and we get to play out daydreams where Dawn is a cat out in the wild. These sequences are incredibly fun, thoughtful, and unique; I would have loved it if the game was primarily exploring Dawn’s internal conflict between home life and “wild” life — while it does get a good amount of focus, it falls short and feels incomplete due to all the other pressing story beats that had to be resolved in such a short runtime. These daydreams also feel tonally out of place at times, especially when we’re dealing with other tough themes.

I really wanted to like Copycat, but it wasn’t an enjoyable experience, even though there’s always something charming about playing through a world as a cat. To its credit, it is emotional, but not in a way that I was expecting, and not in a way that gave the level of room needed for a lot of heavy topics. Even now, I’m not sure who this story was made for, as most people playing a game about cats absolutely adore cats, and the narrative we’re given is one where a character who endangers and abandons a cat gets a happy ending with no external effort, no inner work, no growth. What was all the tragedy for, then?