I never thought I’d be shouting at my monitor for an elephant to get off a button, but then I didn’t know what to expect from Pastagames’ KarmaZoo. It’s a quirky pixel platformer with two to ten players working together to complete a set of levels called a loop. Each player starts as a little blob that can jump and sing, but completing levels together earns you karma poi♔nts to purchase better avatars and abilities.
Pastagames promises that each playthrough will be different as levels adapt to the size of your team and chosen avatars. For example, if you have a spider in your team, then webs will appear throughout the level. Players also vote on Perk cards at the start of each level, a random selection of buffs, which af🌜fects level design, too. Some of the Perk cards are useful, such as making the walls sticky and easier to climb, others are just funny, like making every character a whale, and some are entirely useless. Quite literally, one stated that it did nothing.
Each loop𒁏 is randomly matchmade with other players of varying skill or karma levels, and there’s no voice chat, which makes communication particularly hard. You start with some basic directional emotes, but you’re largely unable to convey instructions to others. There are top-tier avatars to unlock with abilities that literally point to tell the others what to do.
For the preview, myself and two other journalists cheated a little in that we could easily talk to one another in the same room, but we still had to deal with the whims of the rest of our team who weren’t within🎶 earshot. This is where that elephant comes into play.
We were given access to a range of avatars for this demo, though not the guides, and I didn’t need to look far to find my perfect choice — the wolf. Each animaﷺl has a special skill, but you don’t necessarily know what advantage it has right away. The wolf could howl, but I wasn’t sure what use that was. The others at my table chose a teapot, which could shine a light, and a hedgehog, which could put spikes in walls to make them climbable.
We were so eager to get going we inadvertently neglected the tutorial, which would have not only told us everything we could do but also emphasised the importance of staying together. That was our first mistakeꦛ. Your little ragtag ba🌳nd of objects and animals are all within a bubble called a halo, and each level has a timer that counts down to when you all die. If you stray too far from one another, you’ll break off into smaller halos and die much faster.
We found this out the hard way as the three of us zoomed ahead through the level in excitement, only for our bubble to fade out and kill us all. Fortunately, we were down but not out. Once you’re dead, you become little spirits that can’t physically interact with anything but are still visible. We hovered around levers, collectibles, and buttons, generally guiding the team in the right direction. As long a𓆏s at least one player makes it to the end of a level, everyone is revived to continue the loop together.
Freshly reincarnated and learning from past mistakes, we were keen to maintain the ‘safety in numbers’ mantra for the next level. Difficulty increases as you progress through the loop, so we suddenly had to solve puzzles that involve💞d keys and locked doors, musical puzzles that you sing at to prompt doors to open or platforms to move, and pressure plates. There are little crevices for smaller avatars to go through, or you can even revert back to a slime at the press of a button to squeeze through narrow passages.
As long as your halo is intact, you can die without penalty, and yeeting yours🉐elf to certain death can be used to help others. If you throw yourself on some spikes, a tombstone will appear where you died — a solid block — that lets your fellow avatars get across hazards more easily, and earn you karma for doing so.
There can be a lot going on at the same time, and you have to watch out for things that can damage or kill you, all while trying to solve puzzles, collect items, wor▨k together, and successfully reach the end. Without being able to communicate properly, it can be frustrating at times.
During one particularly gruelling level where we had struggled to work in tandem wit🔯hout proper communication, our halo had become dangerously small and the screen was dimming. We were so close to the end. We just had to all get on a platform, not touch the button that pressed it down, and head up to sweet, sweet, victory.
But that never happened, because the elephant wouldn’t get ofജf the button. We couldn’t express to the elephant what it was doing, and no amount of jumping, howling, and singing could convince the elephant to move. We all perished, and our🌊 loop came to a close. Never forgive, never forget.
This loop mode is online only, but there is a local competitive mode we checked out as well that had various little party games. In the one we tried, all players were the same avatar competing to race through a platform level that is continually scrolling. You're dead if you go too slow or get stuck and the screen catches up to you. I won none of these. I’m going to blame the fact I was still hung up on the elephant traitor.
While the local competitive play is a nice touch, the real appeal of KarmaZoo is the online cooperative play. You can choose private servers for games, so I’m already envisioning it being a perfect choice for a TheGamer social night and placing bets on which avatar each editor will pick (a certain editor obsessed with big furry things will definitel𝔍yꦐ choose the lion). Though the lack of communication can be challenging, that’s easy enough to get around by using native console voice chat or Discord.
Now the real question is, can our boss successfully corral nine of her team of 𓆏weird animals and objects through levels of increasing difficulty without them all dying? I guess we’ll find 🌌out when KarmaZoo launches this summer.