1666: Amsterdam Cat Choice, Explained

Quick answer

Pick whichever one you like the sound of. Based on the evidence available before Early Access launch, the Prologue choice appears to be cosmetic — but see the honest caveat below, because the community does not fully agree on this.

What you are actually choosing

Partway through the Prologue, Noa selects a Bateratze — a cat familiar. Players have reported these options:

  • Wilder (also written Wildling) — tied to the natural world
  • Knight — framed in martial terms
  • Hermit — a truth-seeking recluse
  • Alchemist — the transmutation angle
  • Spirit — keeper of otherworldly secrets

The archetype names read like the start of a build system. That is exactly why the question gets asked so often: the presentation implies consequence.

Does it change anything?

This is where sources disagree, so here is the state of the evidence rather than a confident answer.

The most specific claim in circulation is that every option converges on the same companion — a cat named Aaron — with identical abilities, and that only the descriptive text differs. That account is consistent with something you can check yourself: searches for the cat’s name spike around “Aaron” and “Aaron voice actor” regardless of which archetype players picked, which is hard to explain if the five options produced five different companions.

Against that, some community posts advise choosing a cat “to match your playstyle,” and a Steam discussion thread reads the archetype names as implied builds — Knight as melee, Wilder as nature-aligned, and so on. Those posts describe expectations from the naming, not observed mechanical differences.

Our reading: the naming invites a build interpretation the Prologue does not deliver on. Nobody has published a side-by-side comparison showing different abilities from different picks. Until someone does, treat the archetypes as flavour.

The part nobody can answer yet

The Prologue is a self-contained ceremony chapter. The Early Access build launching August 25, 2026 is a different, larger thing, and Panache has not said whether the familiar archetype carries forward or gains mechanical weight later.

There is also a wrinkle worth knowing: Patrice Désilets has talked publicly about the cat as something you play as, not merely travel with. If cat-controlled sections are a real part of the full game, the archetype question could become substantive in a way it is not in the Prologue.

We will update this page once the Early Access build has been played, with the date of verification. We are not going to guess in the meantime.

So what should you pick?

If the choice is cosmetic, pick the one whose description you like — you will be reading its name for a while.

If you want to hedge against the archetype mattering later, Wilder and Spirit are the two most commonly reported picks, which at least means more players will be documenting those paths if differences do emerge.

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