Copycat

I went into Copycat expecting a cozy cat sim with some light feelings attached. What I got instead was a debut from a tiny Australian-Ukrainian duo that made me set down my controller and sit quietly for a few minutes after the credits rolled. That is not a complaint. It is, in fact, the whole point. You start as Olive, a quietly unwell elderly woman moving through an animal shelter at an aching pace. The camera mimics her labored steps, and before you have said a single word to anyone, you already understand everything about her loneliness. Then you switch to her newly adopted cat, Dawn, and the nature-documentary narrator kicks in. A posh, Attenborough-adjacent voice begins narrating Dawn's every move as though she is a panther stalking the Serengeti, not a skeptical rescue cat batting at a feather toy on a living room carpet. The tonal gap between the narrator's grandiose commentary and the mundane domestic reality is genuinely funny, and it does something smart: it makes you love Dawn before the story starts dismantling everything around her. When you hold the controller button to make Dawn purr during a quiet moment with Olive, and floating text reads something like a confession of trust, that small interaction lands harder than most AAA story beats twice its budget. The gameplay sits firmly on the walking-sim end of the spectrum, built around exploration of Olive's home, a handful of mini-games, dream sequences where Dawn imagines herself as a stylized black panther bounding through a pixelated savanna, and quick-time event catfights when the story demands confrontation. The dreamscape design is where the handcraft really shows: colours shift and the world grows chaotic as Dawn's sense of security erodes, making the visuals do quiet narrative work without a single line of dialogue. The original score by Dan Bunting moves between soft, intimate piano and something more cinematic and swelling at key moments, and it earns every emotional cue it reaches for. The voice cast, all Australian locals, holds up throughout. Critics are right that the QTEs escalate into repetitive button sequences later in the game, and a few bugs have been reported across playthroughs, but neither issue breaks what the game is fundamentally trying to do. The honest warning is this: Copycat is not a cheerful cat game. The developers themselves prompt players to go at their own pace before you even start, and that note means something. The story touches on illness, grief, family fracture, and the particular cruelty of abandonment experienced by an animal that cannot understand the reasons. Some reviewers found the second half less emotionally satisfying than the first, feeling that the intimate relationship between Dawn and Olive gives way to a broader, slightly thinner set of themes once the central turning point hits. That critique has merit. The first act is the stronger half, and if the ending leaves you unsettled rather than resolved, that reaction itself is part of what the writing is after. Your own history with pets, with loss, with complicated family will shape what you take from the back end considerably. At roughly two to three hours, Copycat knows its length and does not overstay it. This is a game that trusts a short, precise runtime more than most studios trust a forty-hour one. For anyone drawn to narrative-first experiences, to the quiet handmade sincerity of a small team making something personal, or to the specific kind of hurt that only stories about animals and the humans who love them can deliver, Copycat is exactly what it needs to be.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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