This is a CHARMING co-op platformer with a focus on animals, compassion, helping others, and puzzles. What’s not to like?

KarmaZoo was developed by indie dev Pastagames in Paris. It launched in November 2023 and took seven years to develop and is available on all consoles and PC… and guess what? It’s totally worth your time!

Give a Helping Paw in KarmaZoo

Believe it or not, altruism is a big factor in some video games. It’s not all about blowing crap up and shooting everything in sight. We think of Hideo Kojima’s action-adventure game Death Stranding (2019) and a big part of the experience is about randomly helping other players.

As video games have online access these days, you can help fellow players out in various ways. You just discover their kind gestures you meet in the gaming world and take it from there.

KarmaZoo takes this a step further, where groups of players work together to complete stages. There are 300 in total and up to four players must work together to get through each one, which gains you karma and you use your karma points to unlock new characters. This is it in action!

It’s really a non-competitive game, you’re not competing for high scores or anything. The goal is to work together and get a high from the teamwork, which Pastagames based on emperor penguins and how they work together to overcome problems.

You get around 10 hours of gameplay here, too, but if you want to go on a completionist run this little indie game offers over 30 hours of it! Very good indeed.

The one notable downside is… it’s not a single player game. It’s very upfront about that, of course, the whole point is it’s a co-op game. But it does mean you must play with people online, otherwise you can’t get anywhere.

If you’re well up for that challenge, then this a cute, charming, and engaging platformer with a lot of heart.

Oh Yeah, and KarmaZoo Has a Fab Soundtrack

Good news? KarmaZoo has fabulous score with David Wise/Donkey Kong Country music vibes to it. It’s by the French composer Xavier Thiry who’s in Paris where he makes music for advertising, TV, movies, theatres, games… a bit of everything.

Thiry has gone for ambience overload with this work, it’s really fabulous as its best. We love the below Desert track a great deal. Boopy!

Some of the pieces are really inventive, such as the Jazz Drummer Hero piece. That comes out of nowhere and is a kick drum to listen to (if you like the history of drum solos or some such.

There are 16 pieces in all and it definitely works at its best when riffing off of the DKC series, with a bit of Rayman Origins’ composer Christophe Héral (also French!) thrown into the mix.