Kamioza (Ch1 Azaria)
Discover lost treasure, restore ancient artifacts and unravel forgotten mysteries in this unique First Person multiplayer adventure. A retro game with co-op puzzle solving, micro competitions and resource management. Create powerful spells to protect and thrive in this beautifully crafted world.
Adventure
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VGDB Score
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Overview
Summary
Discover lost treasure, restore ancient artifacts and unravel forgotten mysteries in this unique First Person multiplayer adventure. A retro game with co-op puzzle solving, micro competitions and resource management. Create powerful spells to protect and thrive in this beautifully crafted world.
Description
About This Game
Recently remastered from its 1997 designs, Kamioza brings a simple originality to adventure gaming. It is approachable, mysterious and consuming.
Come discover lost treasure, restore ancient artifacts and unravel mysteries long forgotten. Enter the beautifully bizarre world of Azaria and claim your destiny.
Features and Content
Players start the game by making a simple player avatar that helps visualize your karma, energy and wisdom. They'll also choose one of the two cultures to represent as they begin their unique, first person adventure. The player controls a virtual hand and travels about the world by pointing forward or clicking on areas of interest. The world itself is made up of 360 degree pre-rendered views and panel views that scroll under the player's control. The player collects items, solves puzzles and manages their resources to evolve and solve the mysteries of their ancient ancestors.
CO-OP
Although Kamioza can be played alone, it is much more fitting to play with many players. Players can see each other's hands move about and affect the world. Players can communicate, quickly trade objects, cast spells help or hinder each other in game play. Some of the puzzles are designed to be co-op style efforts, requiring specifically crafted spells or unique objects.
Resources and Crafting
In playing the game, players must collect a poisonous liquid from the Nystrom mines that give off a toxic fume. The Nystrom is required for manufacturing objects in the city and for crafting spells. Its not in any way related to currency but has a value due to its difficulty in mining. Players can control the mines or choose to play more collaboratively.
Spells are crafted by collecting resources in the world (in addition to Nystrom) and using special crafting areas in the temple. Once these spells are crafted they can be used as network spells or as special spells for various puzzles.
Some of the Spells that can be crafted:
Enchant, Stalker, Banishment, Death, Hallucination, Holding, Explosion, Strength, Transfer, Alarm, Revive....
The spells work directly on other players and the environment.
Quests and NPCs
There are several major quests that reveal bits of lore and ancient secrets. These quests are global to a game and are shared by all of the players. There are also quests that are often local to each player and are given by strange creatures called meflin. The meflin reward the players for goals achieved and give hints to help players move forward.
Trading and Commerce
Within any particular game, Items can be sold within the city of Etnoc for Nystrom. The game uses unique algorithms to create player locks on sales lockers that can be used to exchange items for Nystrom. This seemed like an interesting idea in 1996. Players that do find themselves with unique items can use the lockers for some extra scoops of Nystrom.
Development History
Originally titled Azaria, Kamioza was developed by a company we called Singularity in 1996/1997 and was planned to be released by Malofilm Interactive (previously Readysoft). We attended E3 with Malofilm as our publisher and had plans for a press tour when an incredibly bad month happened. Out of the blue, Malofilm shut down and its publishing arm went up for sale and around the same time, due to a death and unfortunate probate, the rights for the game were taken away from the developers.
We had spent over two years building the game with it's unique peer-to-peer network play. The legendary Fat Man (George Sanger) had composed our music and we had conducted hundreds of hours beta testing in over 40 countries. There were articles written that touted our game as "Myst Online" - so we were crushed.
It was around the pandemic time that we were able to get the rights to Azaria and seriously start to work on it again. So much in technology had changed but the core of what we envisioned was all still fun and exciting. It has been a labor of love and a tale of persistence that has brought this product to life again and we are so excited to have people enjoy what we came up with so long ago.
