Copycat
I’ve played a lot of narrative games. They’re one of my go-to staples, with their ability to let me get lost in something and know I can re-emerge with some kind of resolution a few hours later.
Many of these narrative games are sad ones, to the point that I’d jokingly argue it’s a trope of the genre. There are kids dying of cancer, kids dying in accidents, families dealing with dementia, the whole gamut of bad things that can happen that make for a good tear-jerker of a story.
Copycat broke me.
It just does something different with its children, y'know?
Copycat is a narrative, walking simulator-esque game. You play as Dawn, a cat adopted by an elderly lady named Olive to replace a lost cat and fill the hole in Olive’s heart. Dawn must confront what it means to be a pet and decide what her relationship with Olive will be while overcoming her fear of her past.
In the past, I’ve talked about the difficulty games - and cat games in particular - have with depicting the world through a non-human lens while still making their worlds accessible and attractive to humans. Copycat is a rare example of getting that perspective exactly right. The world as presented is clearly one that’s not meant to be fully understood by the cat occupying it, nor is it meant to be a friendly one. The proportions of the building, what’s noticed and what’s not, and how the player engages with the world highlight that this is a world for humans seen through the eyes of a cat. It is extremely well done and well-depicted, and does an excellent job of putting the player into the mind of a cat.
It’s what makes the game so heartbreaking.
In this moment, I am become cat, destroyer of dinners.
From the outset, Copycat makes it clear it isn’t a happy game about a happy cat living a boring, contented life. Copycat is a game about heartbreak, abandonment, and struggling to identify what “home” means in a world replete with trauma. Though it does a good job of weaving some comic relief and lighter moments throughout its narrative with the inclusion of a nature documentary-esque narrator and house-destruction mini-games, it is an emotionally heavy game.
We see the first elements of this heartbreak in the initial moments of the game, where Olive struggles to walk down the corridor to pick out a cat to adopt. As the story wears on and the realities of Olive’s illness become clearer, the fact that we as the player understand that Olive is dying while the cat does and indeed cannot makes the tragedy of what we’re experiencing all the greater. We as players know this stable, contented life Dawn has finally built for herself with Olive will end, and that there is nothing we can do to stop it.
It means when the end does come, it’s not that there is an ending that’s surprising, but rather, the specific form it takes.
#dawndidnothingwrong
Warning that there are spoilers for the game’s ending from this point forward.
There was a specific moment that absolutely broke me. Dawn, for a moment, believed everything would be okay, and then had it all ripped out from under her as Olive dumped her in a park, saying she’d be better off there. As Dawn chases after Olive’s car, both she and the narrator give line after line, asking what she did wrong, promising she can change, and not understanding what is happening. It is, in many ways, a perfect scene. It is emotionally gut-wrenching, but also captures the innocence of a cat faced with a world and motivations she cannot possibly understand. It’s coupled with the horror of what’s happening, the disconnect between what the players believed would happen and the reality now playing out in front of them, and the realisation of what the rest of the game will be. It’s an immaculate scene. It is the scene that, in my opinion, makes this game what it is.
After that point, the game, like Dawn, meanders, figuring out what it wants to do and be. Dawn faces hunger, rejection, and neglect, then ultimately decides to confront Olive about being dumped. She finds her way back to Olive’s house, prepared to give this human the what-for, only to find the house has been sold. There is no resolution. There is no catharsis. There is only an empty house and the memory of what she will never regain. Dejected, Dawn sits in front of traffic, prepared for the end.
The game presents the player with a choice of whether to stay, sitting in front of a car, knowing it means death, or leaving. The game has the cat leave, and then plays out a follow-up scene where Dawn is reunited with Olive, embraced, and allowed to live the pet cat life she always wanted. My head canon is that none of this is real, and that Dawn has gone to the kitty Heaven alluded to earlier in the game. It’s the only ending that makes sense with the game’s moral, and it’s that moral I’m stuck on as I think about Copycat.
The moral of Copycat is very clear from the outset. It’s repeated at both the beginning and end of the game, emphasising the message players are meant to draw from the game. “Home,” it says. “Is not where you are, but where you are needed.” It’s a message that sounds sweet until you give it even a passing thought. If home is where I’m needed most, I think, isn’t that, say, my job? Or at the various conferences where they put my face on the poster? Or in relationships I’ve left because I was being used as an emotional crutch? If home is where I’m needed most, then home is an inherently abusive place, as it’s a place where my needs are subsumed beneath the needs of whoever else occupies that space and my energy.
Or, perversely, it may mean I have no home at all. This is why my reading of the ending of Copycat is the only reading that makes sense. If home is where you’re needed most, and it’s made clear this cat is neither wanted nor needed by the humans in her life, then she has no home. If one’s purpose is only defined by the attention others give, then Dawn and all stray cats like her have no purpose and no validity in their lives. Their lives are defined solely by cruelty and rejection, and because they are rejected, they may as well die.
What makes this moral fail is that it defines our worth by externalities. What determines whether we can be happy is not anything we ourselves can control, but rather, the desires of those around us. If we’re fortunate enough to live in a world where there are those who care about us, and who we care about in return, great. Those fortunate few get to be content in this game’s definition of “home.” For those who don’t have that luxury, though, the game offers no respite, no way to catharsis. There’s only oblivion.
The more I think about it, the more horrific a moral it is. However beautiful the game is and however effective it may be at conveying a cat’s perspective, that it’s coupled with a message that is inherently abusive is a death knell for the game.
Is she, Olive? Is she?
Part of why Copycat broke me so effectively was that it helped me view the world through my cat’s eyes. I chose to play as a little orange cat in memory of my own cat, Athos. I got Athos when I was sixteen. Prior to me getting Athos from the animal shelter, she had been found by animal control, locked in a single-wide trailer and left to starve by a family who no longer wanted her. At the animal shelter, I asked the cat room attendant for the cat least likely to be adopted. I know now that none of the cats were likely to be adopted, and that all were likely eventually euthanised, but I adopted Athos. She purred the entire way home.
Much like Dawn, Athos and I needed a bit of time to get to know one another. She was shy and scared, but with time and love, she came out of her shell. She slept in my bed, was there when I was sad, and put up with all my shenanigans.
And then I went to university. Then I went to grad school. Then I moved for work. Athos stayed behind. She became my sister’s cat, until my sister got married and moved out. Then she became my dad’s cat, until my parents got divorced and my dad moved out. Then she became no one’s cat and lurked in the garden, hunting moles and avoiding my mother’s horde of other cats.
Athos and I were reunited when I was twenty-three, unemployed and stranded in my mother’s basement, waiting for some miracle to get me back out. I showed up at my mother’s house, pulling a suitcase and despair, and she was there, purring and weaving her way through my legs. It was like I never left. She loved me, and she wanted me to know she loved me and always had. I held her, and she held me, and I never left her behind again.
Even when she had a stroke and sat in the vet’s office, growling from within the bowels of a kitty cone, she purred when I reached out for her. She purred until the very end.
I’ve spent years thinking about Athos and what her world looked like. I’ve thought about what it meant for her when I left without explanation, without reason. I’ve thought about the first few days - weeks - she spent, curled up in an empty bed before giving up and wandering to the next best thing. I’ve thought about how it must have felt to be abandoned, again and again, without ever knowing what she’d done wrong, and with us not being able to tell her that it wasn’t her, that it was life, and that our various dramas took precedence over her happiness.
I wish I could explain that to her. I wish I could explain it to Dawn.
I wish I could explain to all of them that their worth isn’t reliant on those they’ve fallen in love with. They are valid, and they are good, and they are worthy, even when those around them very much are not.
In the end, I’m on the fence about how I feel about Copycat. On the one hand, Copycat is a beautiful game that does an excellent job telling a very difficult story. It’s a hard game to play through and process, though it’s rewarding in the exploration it offers. Where I struggle is with its moral and how it chooses to frame the story it’s telling. In choosing to frame its moral in terms of external worth, it cheapens the entire story and perspective it’s used to get there. It advocates for a model of love that is dangerous at best.
Ultimately, the question I (and you) have to decide is what matters most in a game. If the experience is beautiful throughout and just soured by an ambiguous ending, does that render the entire game moot? Does gameplay and immersion matter more than a moral, or does a bad message mean the entire game is a wash? I don’t have an answer to any of these questions, just these thousands of characters, struggling to articulate why this game is still on my mind, even days after playing it.
And yet, that I’ve spent all this time thinking about and processing this game speaks volumes about its effectiveness. It’s a fascinating and beautiful game, and I’m glad I’ve played it, even if I am, in the end, unsure of what to think.
Developer: Spoonful of Wonder
Genre: Narrative, indie
Year: 2024
Country: Australia
Language: English
Play Time: 3 hours
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/Mqi4FiXRxuc