Copycat is the first game by three-person Australian studio Spoonful of Wonder. If you were at PAX Australia or at SXSW Sydney last year, chances are you may have at least seen it on your travels. It’s a game about being a little cat, and its demo has just gone live in the latest Steam Next Fest. The team at Spoonful were kind enough to send along a code in advance of the demo going live.
If you’ve not come across it before, Copycat is a narrative-driven game in which you play a little cat named Dawn. Dawn is a freshly adopted shelter cat who came from a string of bad homes. Initially afraid to believe that she’s finally found her forever home after so many readoptions, Dawn’s life is upended by the intrusion of a jealous stray cat that looks just like her. The interloper enacts a plan to take her place, and Dawn’s owner, an elderly woman named Olive, cannot tell them apart. Just when she thought she had a home, Dawn finds herself thrown out on the street and embarks on a journey of her own about what home truly means.
For the cat lovers in the audience who are afraid a game like that might be emotionally devastating, the good news is the Copycat Next Fest demo does not get into this especially sad part of Dawn’s story. Rather, it sticks to the game’s opening hour, in which Dawn is adopted and begins to settle into her new home. It consists mostly of Dawn being a little butthead– thieving food from plates, knocking things over, and insisting on her status as a fearsome jungle predator, even as she is outstripped by passing butterflies. In other words, she’s definitely a cat — a dummy who has convinced herself she’s a genius. She’s very, very cute, though, which is how she gets away with it.
Before anyone gets in the comments to accuse me of being a hater, I’m a cat guy. I’ve owned and been around cats my whole life. I love them. It’s just that there are two kinds of cat owners: the ones that lavish their cat with praise for being a special perfect angel and the ones that lovingly call them a dumbfuck shitlord in a sing-song voice. I am, and have always been, the second one. Allow me to demonstrate using a popular copypasta:
This is how I was able to get such a quick read on Dawn because the team at Spoonful are clearly cat people, too. All the usual cat behaviours are present and accounted for, and that’s communicated all the way down to Dawn’s animations and movements.
To be clear: this is not a cat game on the level of something like Stray, a game made by many more people with a much larger budget. To compare the two would be unfair, and yet I worry that people will. If they do, they will find that Copycat feels somewhat rudimentary by comparison. But within this one-hour demo, Copycat demonstrates an understanding of the relationship between cat and owner that Stray never displayed any real interest in.
As she scuffles about the house and gets into trouble — ripping up the sofa and tearing toilet rolls apart — Dawn resists the feeling that she’s getting used to the place, her thoughts communicated in English as she explores. “Freedom,” she thinks every time she passes the back door. “Who’s the guy with the whiskers?” she wonders, sniffing a picture placed low on a bookshelf.
The controls are fairly simple, and Copycat does recommend a controller for the best game feel. You can use your keyboard and mouse though, if you prefer. One thing I’ll note, and I’m sure Spoonful can address it before launch, is that I used a DualSense PS5 controller and the demo detected it as an Xbox controller. All the button prompts displayed Xbox inputs. This meant that the X button wasn’t really X at all; it was Square. A small amount of cognitive reframing had to take place for me to get through the demo, but it’s fine. Like I say, a minor thing and I’m sure the team will fix it eventually.
The Copycat demo is a smart, effective springboard to a game that feels like it has big ideas to communicate. I look forward to playing the full (and likely altogether more traumatic) full game in the future.
You can play the Copycat demo during Steam Next Fest.
Screenshot: Spoonful of Wonder, Kotaku Australia
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