Thank you Spoonful of Wonder for providing us with a review code!

Spoonful of Wonder is a two-person development team based in Australia. When launching Copycat, you’ll see a splash screen honoring the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and respecting their connection with the sky, sea, and soil. Outside of that, religion doesn’t play much of a role outside of taking the Lord’s name in vain.

Copycat begins with an elderly lady named Olive adopting a cat the looks like the one she lost a few weeks prior. As the player, you get to decide what this cat looks like. Before leaving with the cat, Olive promises to open up her home to it and care for it. Olive names the cat Dawn. Once named, you take control of the cat.

Dawn is skeptical of Olive as she had a bad experience with humans in her past. You get to decide how trusting or mean Dawn will be with Olive. I wasn’t fond of some of the choices given to me. For example, I had to pick between scratching or biting Olive when I wanted to do neither. Later in the game you’ll have to hunt and make a moral decision of going after the mother bird or her baby. Thankfully, violence is minimal in this game and whenever an animal is hunted, there is no blood shown.

It takes Dawn a little while to warm up to Olive as she yearns to be a wild cat, but enjoys the amenities of a warm shelter and easy access to food that she doesn’t have to hunt for. In the living room you’ll often see and hear scenes from a nature show about cats. The show narrator will break the 4th wall and encourage Dawn to do things as cats in the wild do.

Copycat is a rather short game that can be completed in roughly three hours. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but I will say that there are some mature scenes where Dawn will witness an attempted murder and a character in the game will contemplate suicide. Depending on choices made, a happy ending is possible. While exploring the neighborhood Dawn will overhear neighbors arguing and a lesbian couple professing their love for one another.

This title is more about telling a story than action, but there is a fair amount of platformer and quick-time-event based gameplay. The quick time events get more complex later in the game.

Copycat has an autosave system that is not very reliable. I lost over an hour’s worth of gameplay and had to manually edit my save file to resume from a recently played checkpoint. Editing your save file may come in handy if you want to retry events that kept you from earning one of the twenty-one Steam achievements available.

The voice acting is well done, especially for the nature expert egging Dawn on. The background music is pleasant, but I didn’t enjoy it enough to buy the $3.99 DLC for it.

There’s a demo available for Copycat and I recommend checking it out if this game intrigues you. The asking price of $14.99 is reasonable, but I would hold off on a sale since this game is on the short side. The story is good and will make you think twice about the commitment of owning a pet.