Peridot is an upcoming AR game from Niantic about breeding unique creatures

After dabbling with several well-known IPs, including Pokemon, Pikmin, and Harry Potter, Niantic has announced an original game called Peridot. It sees you looking after, raising and breeding the titular creatures. It won't surprise anyone to hear it's an AR game, and it's set to enter soft launch beta testing this month for iOS and Android.

As mentioned, the gameplay revolves around creatures called Peridots. They have awoken after sleeping for thousands of years and find themselves in a world they don't recognise. It's up to you to care for them to ensure they don't go extinct. You will raise them from a baby to adulthood by earning experience points by petting, playing, and training with them.

Niantic claims that each Peridot is unique, with different physical appearances, likes, dislikes, and abilities. When breeding new Peridots, the game uses a mixture of hand-crafted assets and procedural generation to create each creature. The system takes inspiration from the way DNA works in real life.

You can breed your Dot when it becomes an adult, and the aim is to diversify the species to help it survive. So, you will look to hatch babies from different archetypes, including Unicorn, Peacock, Cheetah, Ram, Rabbit, and Clownfish, among others. To breed new Peridots, you will need to head to a Habitat and use a Nest. These can determine one or more mutations for your future baby Dot and allows you to influence the appearance of your new friend.

As with all Niantic games, Peridot will encourage you to head outside and explore the world. Each creature will have different desires it needs your help with, and to fulfil them, you will need to venture outside. Some of these tasks might include walking a set distance, visiting a particular place or eating a specific food type.

Finally, as an AR game, Peridot will use your phone's camera to try and bring each creature to life. Using Niantic's Lightship ARDK tech, Dots can recognise different surfaces like dirt, sand, and grass. From this, they can forage for food depending on the surface. For instance, they'll find kelp in water and beets in the sand.

Peridot will release on the App Store and Google Play, with the game being rolled out to different countries as the game develops. It is a free-to-play game with in-app purchases.