KarmaZoo

I'll be straight with you: KarmaZoo is not a shooter, and I spend most of my life in games where the goal is to delete the other team. So when I sat down with this one I was prepared to be bored in about fifteen minutes. That didn't happen. Pastagames built something genuinely unusual here - a 10-player co-op platformer where the mechanical trick isn't kill trading or respawn timers, but actual forced cooperation baked so deep into the structure that griefing is largely designed out. The halo system is the core of it: your character stays protected and can respawn as long as you stay near at least one teammate. Stray too far and that halo shrinks down to nothing, benching you as a ghost until the next stage starts. It sounds punishing. In practice it turns the whole lobby into a coordinated unit almost by accident. The two main modes are The Loop and Totem. The Loop is the real game - a team of up to 10 players queues into a series of timed procedurally assembled stages drawn from a pool of over 300 levels. Which levels you get depends on the characters your team is running, which means an armadillo in the party is likely to summon more spike-heavy stages that only an armadillo can safely cross. That adaptive level logic is clever and it holds up after a dozen runs. Each run takes roughly twenty minutes across five timed levels - short enough that a session never overstays its welcome. Totem is the local and private-lobby mode, a selection of competitive minigames where everyone is on equal footing with no character ability advantages. It is lighter and works fine as a warm-up, but it is clearly the B-side. The 50 unlockable forms - everything from elephants and blowfish to a compass and a teapot - are the long-term hook. You unlock them by spending Karma earned in-game, and the progression stays consistent enough that most sessions feel like forward motion. The KarmaPass is a smart inversion of the usual monetisation angle: it unlocks automatically based on global collective playtime, no payment required. That said, completionists will grind. Unlocking the full roster is genuinely expensive in Karma terms, and with no solo mode you are dependent on other players being online to earn anything at all. Here is the real talk on population. Steam concurrent numbers dropped hard after launch and the game now runs on a skeleton crew of active players. Cross-platform play with console helps, but if you queue into The Loop at an off-peak hour you may wait. The honest recommendation is to treat this as a friend-group game with a private lobby code, not a reliable matchmaking experience in 2025. With friends on voice chat the whole thing clicks - levels that seem obtuse with randoms become funny and satisfying when someone can call out a strategy. With randos and no communication, frustration is a real possibility since there is no in-game voice and emotes start thin (you unlock more over time). The pixel art is clean and the soundtrack does exactly what it needs to without being intrusive. Visual readability can get cramped given the limited halo-focused camera, but it rarely becomes a dealbreaker. If your usual Friday night involves rotating a five-person Discord group through whatever co-op oddity Devolver published last, KarmaZoo earns a spot in that rotation without question. Go in solo hoping to vibe with randoms and you may hit a queue wall. Either way, the design philosophy here - structurally rewarding cooperation and mechanically removing most routes to toxicity - is worth experiencing at least once. Fred, Scout Team