Niantic’s upcoming virtual pet AR game sounds like Pokémon GO crossed with Pikmin Bloom

You’ll raise and breed adorable creatures

Niantic has just announced a brand-new collection-based augmented reality game. Seeing that this is just about the only style of game the developer creates, it comes as no surprise. What is surprising is that there’s no brand attached; this is a fresh creation directly from Niantic, known as Peridot, and it would appear that pet rearing is a focus. Peridot offers Tamagotchi-like mechanics where you’ll raise and unlock new forms of adorable pets, combined with daily walks, and it will enter soft-launch on Android and iOS sometime soon.

The above teaser trailer offers a quick glimpse of a few adorable Peridots in real-world settings. This is more a cinematic than an actual trailer, as no gameplay is shown, though it’s still early days. Luckily Niantic has shared a few screenshots illustrating the current UI. More or less, Peridot looks like a Niantic AR game, cute creatures and all.​​​​​​​

So far, we know breeding will play a primary role, more than likely taking a page out of Pokémon GO’s book. Also, similarly to Pikmin Bloom, you can take your Peridot on daily walks. So it would seem Niantic is taking the lessons (and mechanics) learned from previous releases to implement them in this original title.

Peridot should soft-launch soon in select territories across Android and iOS, though it doesn’t sound like this beta will be public. Of course, Niantic already offers a way to pre-register on the game’s website if you’d like to receive a notification whenever Peridot is available in your country. Niantic says it will use this beta phase to gather feedback to prime the game for its eventual release.​​​​​​​

So there it is; Niantic is working on yet another AR game, but it’s an original property this time around. Details are still light, so things like monetization haven’t been mentioned, but I would hope that since Niantic is once again targeting children with adorable collectible creatures, it forgoes the excessive monetization found in its previous titles. Fingers crossed.

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