KarmaZoo is a cooperative platformer where players must work together to survive a loop of levels. The more you do to help your team, the more karma you earn. Though you start as a little blob, you can unlock different avatars with your hard-earned karma, with each new form possessing a different skill to help the team progress.
Helping your team is easier said than done, especially when you haven’t unlocked much. There are puzzles and various mechanics to navigate, but with no built-in voice chat for you to confer with one another, KarmaZoo is all the more challenging.
“The progression of the player in the game is about acquiring more ways to communicate,” Pastagames designer Nadim Haddad tells me. “You start off unable to say what you mean and being a bit helpless. You're this blob. You don't have a lot of powers. You can only sing in a direction, that's it. As you progress in the game, you have new emotes, new animations and arrows that help point to things, and you unlock characters that show stuff and solve the problem for others.
“If you reach the higher levels, you become a pure bodiless, spiritual guide that just floats and points at things. The Panda, the first sherpa, has hands to point at stuff and show everything. If, in your team, there's a character that's able to communicate a lot, then it’s less work for you. If you're the only high-level character, it's all on you. It's really about adapting. Adapt to the group, adapt to the characters, adapt to the level of skill of each person.”
Haddad tells me his favourite loops have been where he is the sole high-level character and has nine blobs to guide, because you get more karma for helping a lower-level person. It also means most of the heavy lifting of puzzle solving falls to you, so you get more karma for performing the majority of the actions, too.
While many online games have players avoiding newbies to steer clear of frustrating runs due to inexperience, KarmaZoo encourages it by rewarding the most helpful among us. It doesn’t matter if teammates die along the way, because the game focuses on the success of the team, rather than the individual. You might have a tough run with a lot of newbies (and deaths), but you’ll earn a lot more karma for doing so.
“We want to make an anti-gatekeeping game,” Haddad says. “A blob will give you more karma than an experienced player. So the less you know about the game, the more hearts you give, naturally. At the end of the level, as long as one of you succeeds, everybody is revived.”
Having a team of experienced players introduces new challenges. There are millions of handmade levels in the game, as each level adapts to your team, taking into account their avatars, abilities, and perks. For example, if you have a wolf in your party, there will be more musical puzzles, and if you have an elephant, there will be more wall mechanics to overcome. The more varied and experienced your team is, the more varied and challenging the levels become.
The loop adapts and evolves to different circumstances as well. If a certain avatar disconnects, puzzles targeting their mechanic will not appear in the next level. Should an avatar disappear or bite the dust mid-run, other players can inherit their avatar to overcome specific obstacles tailored to them.
While you can’t choose whether you join a randomly match-made loop with newbies or more experienced players, you can choose your own avatar. Whether you have a high-level guide avatar or not, you can return to being one of the more basic avatars if you wish to. “Some of them are more complex to play,” Haddad says about avatar abilities. “It ranges from egoistic to altruistic. So the first avatars [you unlock] run faster, jump higher, and then you go up all the way to sherpa.”
Though KarmaZoo offers a party game-style competitive local mode, the cooperative loop mode is online only. Each player has their own camera, so it wasn’t feasible to make this mode in local co-op. Haddad tells me AI avatars to fill teams or allow for offline play were never considered because KarmaZoo is about real player experience. “It's all about player stories. This game is a sandbox for player stories,” he says, jokingly adding, “And today I was with a hedgehog and a cactus, and the llama spit on me!”
Haddad tells me the main inspiration for KarmaZoo came from emperor penguins, specifically how they work together to survive on the ice, “When there's a cold storm, the ones from the outside take all the cold. After a while, they go inside the group to warm up, and the others go toward the cold, and they cycle through.
“It's about sharing the load. If it's cold, let's share the complicated part of what we're going through. Let's share these problems, but not everyone has to do everything at the same time. As long as a few of us work, everything will be fine.”
In the seven years that Pastagames has worked on KarmaZoo, the game has gone through thousands of different iterations, but the core philosophy behind it has stayed the same. It’s about helping one another, with Haddad telling me it’s that sense of holding the door open for someone else.
“In French, we have something called gallantry. You're kind to the next person. We decided to make a game exactly about this, holding the door open to get, 'thank you'. Some people need the thank you, some people just want to hold the door open. Nobody cares why, as long as they hold the door open for the folks around them.”
With over 50 avatars available in the game, you can bet there were plenty more on the drawing board while KarmaZoo was in development. After playtesting, several were cut, with Haddad telling me some of the rejected avatars included an oak tree, a flying eye, a prism that lit the whole screen up like a disco ball if you shone a light on it, and — despite it being the core inspiration — sadly the penguin didn’t make the final cut.
KarmaZoo is set to launch this summer for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch.