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 left me feeling conflicted.

The game begins with you, as Olive, choosing a cat to adopt from a rescue shelter. Immediately you realise that Olive has some pretty severe health issues, and is struggling to maintain an air of composure as she struggles to finish the interaction. Before long, you’re playing as the cat you selected, meowing back to Olive as she drives you to her new home. While the rest of the game is fully voiced, we see Dawn’s thoughts appear as text within the world. There’s some delightful characterisation in this text, and we get drip-fed information on Dawn’s past.

Dawn dreams of being a wild cat, like the lions and tigers she sees in nature documentaries on Olive’s TV. Throughout the game, her experience is narrated as if in one of these documentaries – a posh-sounding British voice tells us how jungle cats have lightning-fast reflexes when hunting prey, as Dawn bats at a cat toy with her paws awkwardly. There are some fantastic jokes, and this commentary becomes the narration that frames much of the game. It questions her decisions and abilities, pondering if she truly has what it takes to survive as a wild cat, and Dawn in turn pushes back.

The gameplay is simplistic, and is intentionally not the star of the show. Aside from moving around the world, different sections have little mini-games that evolve as Dawn daydreams of being in the wild. There are catfights too, which boil down to a series of quicktime button presses. Occasionally the game throws in a sequence of 3D platforming, and this is where it feels the weakest. The movement is a bit clunky, which is not a problem for wandering around the world and investigating, but becomes an issue when you have to jump between moving platforms. These sequences felt unnecessary, but thankfully they are infrequent and short. There is, however, a dedicated meow button, which should be a legal requirement for all cat-based video games.

A word of warning

Copycat is a short experience – it took me just over two and a half hours to roll credits. Because of that, it’s very difficult to discuss the plot and themes without getting into spoiler territory that would affect your experience of playing through this game. This review will avoid as many spoilers as possible, but with that in mind: if you want to experience Copycat for yourself, I highly recommend you go and play it now before continuing past this paragraph. This is an exciting project from a small team that is highly deserving of your support, and for many people, you’ll want to go in as blind as possible. Your experience will likely be hugely different to mine, and this review will be here waiting for you once you’re done.

With that in mind, let’s sink our claws in.

An e-meow-tional rollercoaster

The first act of Copycat focuses on you slowly building up your relationship with Olive, and learning to trust her. Dawn begins very distrusting of all humans, and we get to slowly experience her settling in to her new home. This section includes some open-ended sections where you’re given a playground to run around in, and we learn about Olive’s life through the things in her home. But after the main turning point of the story, the experience becomes far more streamlined and controlled, in a way that makes everything before it feel a bit like the set up to the ‘real’ narrative. The issue is that all the most interesting, impactful and compelling stuff happens in that first half, and the main story that the game follows from there is far less compelling.

Being as vague as possible: in the first half of the game, Olive is facing a major decision that will affect the rest of her life. This decision, along with her health issues and relationship with her daughter Mae, is the main issue driving the story forward. The second half of the game removes you entirely from this storyline, and at the very end you return to find that the issue has been resolved off-screen. We don’t get to see the climax of her story, why she makes the decision that she does, or how she reconciles her relationship with her daughter. This made the entire ending feel anticlimactic – there is no sense of closure or of having overcome anything.

This only hit so hard because I genuinely cared about these characters. Olive and Mae’s relationship is strained – sometimes extremely confronting – but it’s grounded and feels real. Samantha Cable’s writing does a truly superb job of fleshing them out in such a short space of time, making you feel as if you’re peering through a window into the hardest point of someone’s life. These characters are at breaking point, staring down the barrel of an inevitability we all know, trying their best to make it through. It’s compelling, and is easily the strongest aspect of the experience. The second half of Copycat is trying to explore other themes of belonging, forgiveness, and what home really means. But this exploration is far more shallow than the plot the game leaves behind, and the entire time I was just powering through, trying to get back to the characters I had become deeply invested in. When the game finally returns, it’s only to show you an outcome that’s already happened. It ultimately makes the message feel a bit rushed, a bit out of nowhere, a bit unjustified. It doesn’t feel like Dawn gets a satisfying ending to her story.

Despite some imperfect narrative choices, Copycat is still something really special. The game will touch something deep inside you and invite reflection. In the days following my experience, I kept thinking about the characters and the events, questioning how I would react in the same situation. Even in trying to articulate why the ending left me unsatisfied, Copycat’s themes wormed their way deeper into my brain. You are going to have a wildly different experience to me based on what you bring in to your play-through. The pets you’ve had in your life, your experience with illness and grief, all of it will impact what you take away from this game. It’s also scored by a gorgeous original soundtrack, with music that feels orchestral and grandiose at times, and soft, intimate and introspective at others. It really elevates the key moments of the plot, giving the experience a deep cinematic feeling.