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Cat Quest, Stray, Astro Aqua Kitty – Cats as protagonists in video games are more popular than ever. In Copycat, two of them fight for the lead role.
When the older lady Olive adopts the young black, white and red cat Dawn at the animal shelter and takes her home, neither of them expects what will transpire in the coming weeks. After a while they both get along well, but then the shock: a wild cat that looks exactly like Dawn suddenly takes her place. The disenchanted Dawn sets out to find her way back home and, above all, goes on a journey in which she finds herself.
On her journey, Dawn not only explores the small, charming house and its garden, but also the surrounding area, such as the adjacent street and the park. The game’s linear progression determines Dawn’s current location. There are some environmental puzzles to solve and there is little to discover apart from the main story, very different to, for example, Stray. Dawn is repeatedly faced with decisions, such as whether to hiss at Olive or approach her calmly. There’s no indication for any long-term consequences to these decisions.
Dawn has to assert herself against rival cats, which plays out in quick-time events (QTEs). While the QTEs are quite easy to master at the beginning, we have to enter the button prompts really quickly in later confrontations. In endless runner sequences Dawn escapes from dogs by avoiding obstacles under time pressure. In dream sequences she turns into a panther and goes hunting. Some collectibles have also been hidden in the levels for achievement hunters. All of this is largely unchallenging and even if one or two mini-games offer some variety, Copycat quickly becomes monotonous in terms of gameplay.
Technically, we didn’t have any problems with the Unity engine-based game for the most part, other than sometimes jumping into areas that probably shouldn’t be accessible and then having to reload. The low-poly look is charming and the lighting often looks quite atmospheric, but that doesn’t hide the fact that Copycat isn’t particularly convincing graphically with its thick fog, simply designed flora and fauna, sometimes grotesque-looking people and choppy animations. The game’s soundtrack contributes well to telling the emotional story.
Conclusion
Despite the many cat games, Copycat has a unique selling point, besides the good pun as the title: a cat’s journey of self-discovery has not often been a topic in video games and the story offers a handful of emotional moments and interesting twists that we didn’t see coming. The music and the dubbing, which is only available in English, are convincing, but Copycat is not up to date technically or in terms of gameplay. The accessible areas are often quite small and appear quite lifeless despite being pretty detailled at times. In addition, we mostly follow the story and have very little influence on the gameplay. The pacing also seems a bit unbalanced in some places. Cat fans should enjoy the approximately three-hour adventure, but we recommend that everyone else plays the demo first. Copycat will be released for PC on Steam on September 19th, 2024.
Spoonful of Wonder provided us with the PC version of Copycat that we used to create the screenshots.