Copycat - an emotional story about rejection, family and the need to belong

It's been a long time since a game made me cry, and Copycat has succeeded in that again. This emotional work is the work of a small team of creatives called Spoonful of Wonder, located in Australia. This is their first game and at the same time the biggest project they have worked on so far.

You start the story as Dawn, an abandoned shelter cat who is skeptical of humans. The only thing he dreams about is freedom. To her surprise, one day she is taken in by an old woman named Olive, and over time the two of them grow closer. Olive admits to her that before she had an almost identical cat that disappeared when she ended up in the hospital and her heart was empty without a pet. Dawn slowly begins to accept the role of a pet and gets used to her new environment. The idyllic situation ends when one day Olive's health deteriorates and a cunning impersonator who looks just like Dawn takes advantage of this situation, takes her place and forces her to live on the streets. Dawn then finds herself in a series of trials, such as street fights, running away from dogs and finding food. Being accepted and having a home is the only thing she wants now, and she decides to overcome all challenges so that Olive will embrace her. Will Olive recognize her and reject the intruder or maybe keep both cats? Or was it Dawn who was the impersonator all along? The story unfolds, and I will deliberately not present it in its entirety here.

According to the type of games, Copycat belongs to the third-person narrative and adventure game, and genre-wise it could be categorized as a psychological drama accompanied by a rather effective soundtrack. In addition to the emotional story, the player has the opportunity to spend time exploring his environment. Many objects in the house and yard are interactive and sometimes accompanied by the inner thoughts of our feline protagonist. There is also a touch of humor when you get the chance to behave like a typical cat and make a mess around the house, such as kicking things off the table, destroying toilet paper and scratching the furniture. You also have the opportunity to play a couple of mini-games. Although the management of the game was originally designed for a controller, the game can be played without any problems with a keyboard and mouse, if you decide for a PC copy. My preference was keyboard and mouse (you'll have a hard time getting me to use a controller on a PC). Although the game sometimes has difficulties with camera angles, the difficulty of the gameplay is casual, so certain technical difficulties will not affect your progress in the gameplay or significantly prevent you from completing a certain task. Speaking of the difficulty of the gameplay, in certain situations when fighting with dogs and cats you have to quickly press all the buttons on the screen before the time runs out.

I have to admit that it can be inconvenient at a certain point, because sometimes there are too many of them in a given time for us keyboard lovers. However, the developer also thought of that, and when you press everything twice in time, the next combination of keys to press is no longer time-limited. After all, the goal of the game is to experience the story, not to stress about a specific task. Therefore, this conception is perfectly fine. In general, the whole game can be completed in three hours, and if you complete it all at once, you will get an achievement for it. In addition to this, there are about twenty more achievements that are easy to miss, so it wouldn't be bad to "take a look" at what's on offer before you start playing. As for hardware requirements, the game can also be "run" without problems by an older graphics card, such as my GTX1080 at full HD settings (despite the RTX recommendation for normal gaming), but it is preferable to have a minimum of 16 GB of RAM. A demo is available in the offer, so you can try the game on your configuration before you decide to buy a PC copy. In addition to PC, the game will be available for PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One/Series X / S, Nintendo Switch and Mac OS in a few months.

In short, if you like games with an emphasis on narrative and emotion, you could put this touching indie title on your list. What I love about indie games is almost always some symbolism of a certain life issue in the story that the video game as a medium can effectively and creatively convey through visual and auditory means. In that segment, Spoonful Of Wonder, Nuuvem Inc and Neverland Entertainment with Copycat definitely did a very solid job.

A review copy of the game was provided by publishers Neverland Entertainment, Nuuvem Inc and Spoonful Of Wonder.