Preliminary warning: If you play this game, it is crucial you switch to the “advanced” input mode. It’s not really any more difficult. The default settings are really, really bad.
Copy Kitty triggers a feeling of familial recognition I last had while playing Rabi-Ribi: these people, too, are perverts. But while Rabi-Ribi was a sort of uneven work with a voyeuristic perversion that worked against its themes and mechanics, Copy Kitty makes no pretense about gratuitously, ubiquitously indulging its own age-regressive power fantasy. It is not so often you get such direct passage into the squishy, gooey, plushy heart of a game’s author and it is especially less often that you get to pilot it yourself to such decadent heights. This game really does feel like a little kid designed it, if a little kid could be born with a mastery of gameplay programming and technical art, plus drawings good enough that you could hang them up on the fridge without embarrassment. It’s the kind of game a little kid might pray every day to be brought to existence in the magical way you think games work when you’re young, a naive ideal game form that, in reality, is just a little too idealistic, only communicable in a breathless chain of “and then”s. And then you combine the lightning and the explosions to make lightning explosions, and then you set the lightning explosions on fire, and then you blow up the terrain and it flies everywhere in big flaming chunks, and then you fight a giant robot and then when you beat the giant robot you get in the giant robot and then fight another giant robot, etc, and then a wise and weathered adult like you or me would say, yes sweetheart that would be delightful wouldn’t it, and then the little kid grows up to actually make that game real.