Hands-on with Landing Party, the AR game that turns your park into an alien planet

• Landing Party is a new AR outdoor RPG from Johnny Monsarrat, one of the architects of MMO gaming
• Unlike Pokémon Go, it lays a full game zone across any real-world space (a park, your garden, even indoors)
• We went hands-on with the demo at GDC, and it feels like virtual laser tag

Picture this: you're walking through the Moscone Center in San Francisco when a large furry creature lunges at you from behind a bench. You sidestep. It follows. You point your finger and shoot it.

If you think you’ve seen augmented reality (AR) games before, Johnny Monsarrat would like a word. Monsarrat is not a newcomer to big ideas. As co-founder of Turbine, he helped shape the MMO genre into what it is today (think: Dungeons & Dragons Online, Lord of the Rings Online). He's someone who looked at the early internet and thought, “People should be able to share a world together.” Now he's asking a similar question about the outdoors.

Landing Party is his answer. Unlike Pokémon Go and its imitators, which drop creatures onto fixed map points, it lays a game zone across whatever indoor or outdoor space you have to hand – a shopping centre, a parking lot, your back garden. You walk through it. It moves around obstacles if you need it to (“Grab the Game,” as Monsarrat calls it, is one of several patented features that let the play area adapt to your surroundings). Your friends join in, and you can play against each other or the aliens in the environment.

We first covered this game back in 2024, but it’s come on since then and is gearing up for a big launch this year. The chance to play it with Johnny Monsarrat himself, in person, in a big space like the San Francisco conference centre, was too good to miss.

It feels a little bit like a mobile version of laser tag, but that’s only half the story. You view the world through your phone screen, which you hold up to see what’s around you – and what you see are the components of a fully-fledged RPG. The first planned game is a sci-fi story set on an alien planet, with character classes, player advancement, a full combat system, and a mystery at its heart. There are 12 missions in the current demo build. What Monsarrat is building toward is way more ambitious.

PATENTS PENDING

The tech does a number of smart things in order to make use of the environment. There are virtual walls visible on screen, for instance, if you’re in an indoor location, but you can’t just walk through one in the real world: the game is smart enough to realise that would be cheating, and so it will redraw the virtual obstacle a little further away.

It can also handle height, by moving around what you can see – perhaps there’s a crater in the alien environment on your phone, and as you walk towards it, you can see on the phone that you’re descending into it (even if in the real world you’re still on your lawn). Equally, if you’re on a hillside at your local park, the world on your screen adapts and places obstacles and creatures at the right height.

There’s also a way for the game world to move faster than the real world. “[That] is how a racing car game would work,” explains Monsarrat. “Going at seven times speed is pretty cool.” The Landing Party team also has a patent pending on that display trick.

Can you play it solo if you are sans friends right now? “Of course,” says Monsarrat. “I know from the MMO world that most people want to play these games solo. We did Dungeons & Dragons Online, and there was some conflict because a lot of players just want to play solo. So that's allowed, and everything we do [means] you could play the entire game just solo. We just moved the challenge levels down.”

FROM POINT TO PLANE

When it comes to AR, the obvious comparison is Pokémon Go. But Monsarrat thinks it’s about time somebody took the format further; he is candid about where he thinks existing AR games fall short. “Niantic came out of Google Maps. They're not really a games company. They're more like a tools company. So they didn't know what to do [after] Pokémon Go,” he says. What he wants to see is a more rounded, narrative game that isn’t simply based on collecting things at set map points. “They're so mapping fixated. They left this dead space: outdoor gaming. Action role-playing, strategy, and simulation: they require a game zone. We're facilitating that. And our plan is to launch our own first game to prove the technology, but then to have a video game development platform where others can make their own game because it's a great way to grow.”

Like a lot of mobile games, the plan is for that first title to be free to play, with in-app purchases. And the team hints at future developments where one user could act as a dungeon master, controlling the world for other players. There’s also the suggestion that they could port the game to AR glasses in time. But not VR: this is intended for mobile first and foremost, because the big goal is getting people out from behind the desk.

MOBILE BECOMES AR BECOMES VR

“[Some] people want VR immersion as though graphics is the most important thing about gaming, which I don't think it is,” he says. “Actually getting up, walking around, there's a sense of proprioception [a sense of your own body’s place in space], where your hands are. There's something even more immersive about that.”

And of course, it’s a social game which ultimately gives Monsarrat his biggest win: “Just moving around it bonds people together. There's a global crisis of loneliness, and I can generate real-world friendships.”

The first version of Landing Party is currently available for download on the Apple App Store and Google Play, with Monsarrat now fundraising to build out a full game.