Niantic Labs started out as a division of Google working on the mobile augmented reality (AR) game Ingress, but after becoming an independent company in 2015, the company focused on AR games based on third-party media franchises (like Pokémon Go). Niantic today revealed its first original game since Ingress and Ingress Prime, called Peridot.

Niantic wrote in a blog post, "after thousands of years of slumber, Peridots (or Dots for short) are waking to a world vastly different from the one in which they used to roam, and they’ll need our help to protect them from extinction. You’ll foster your own Peridots as you embark on this experience. These are creatures who feel so real, you’ll love every moment raising them from birth to adulthood."

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Peridots seems similar to other pet simulation games or toys, like Nintendogs or Tamagotchi, but with the usual augmented reality features found in Niantic's other games. The below screenshots show off walking and playing with Peridots in real-life environments, breeding them with other Peridots, and finding "treasures" around the world. It seems to have the same photography features as Pokémon Go, where you can drop the pet into your phone's camera feed and save pictures.

Niantic has mostly been working on augmented reality games based on existing media franchises, so Peridots is a departure for the company. Pokémon Go remains Niantic's best success story so far, which was a worldwide sensation at release in 2016 and continues to receive updates and community events on a regular basis. Harry Potter: Wizards Unite was released in 2019 in partnership with Warner Bros, but that game shut down in January. Catan: World Explorers was in testing for a year before it was shut down last year, and a tie-in game based on Transformers is currently in a soft-launch period. The company's most recent full release is Pikmin Bloom, another collaboration with Nintendo.

Niantic plans to soft-launch the game in "select markets" soon. You can sign up for an email newsletter to be notified when it goes live.

Source: Niantic