Niantic wants to mix Pokémon Go with Pikmin Bloom to maximize the cuteness with Peridot

Peridot is an upcoming real-world AR (augmented reality) adventure pet game where you care for creatures that feel like a cross between Pokemon and Pikmin, raise them to adulthood (instead of evolving, I guess), and explore the real world together. The goal of the game is to re-diversify the Peridot population and protect them from extinction.

In order to play, you’ll point your camera at the real world and your Peridot will appear as an overlay to whatever is in your lens in the same way that Niantic’s other games (Ingress, Pokemon Go, Pikmin Bloom, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite) have done in the past. It’s worth noting that many of these AR games are now no longer in service, and Pokemon Go seems to be the only one that remains popular. My guess is that Niantic is trying to capitalize on all of the success of Pokemon without copying it directly.

As for the Peridots themselves, they look very abstract – almost painterly in nature, and seem to be alien species. You’ll play with and even feed your creatures, and the whole experience gives a modern Tomagatchi feel if you ask me. I was absolutely not a fan of Pikmin Bloom and the whole feeding your plants thing, so it’s cool to see that you feed Peridots plants and flowers to help them grow (Are we feeding them Pikmin? Is this some sort of subversive narrative about the failure of Pikmin Bloom?)

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. While you explore the world together, you’ll get to learn more about your cute new friends, develop a bond as you nurture and play with them, and work with other players to diversify their species.

Here are some of the highlights of the gameplay features:

• Care for your magical new Peridot
• Satisfy your creature’s desires – This seems to be the Tomagatchi aspect of feeding, etc.
• Play with your unique Peridot – Again, Tomagatchi-esque, but definitely feels akin to petting your Pokemon in AR mode
• Adventure together on daily walks – Points for daily walks seems to play off of Pokemon egg hatching mechanics, I guess
• Explore new places together – The player may be rewarded for visiting new real-world locations
• Uncover hidden treasures around the world – Peridot Pokestops? I couldn’t help myself.
• Breed new generations of Peridots – Pokemon Go didn’t even have breeding!
• Discover various Peridot archetypes – Pokedex!
• Share your discoveries with friends – Pokemon Go-style AR snapshots that can be shared via social apps or MMS.

Peridots is apparently in soft launch right now, but not yet available for most users on the Google Play Store or App Store. You can pre-register if you’d like to. Niantic is apparently using much more advanced Lightship ARDK technology, allowing the Peridots themselves to perceive, recognize and interact with the real world’s soil, sand, water, grass, and plants in ways that past games couldn’t.

If you want my personal opinion, I don’t believe that anything that works nearly identical to Pokemon but that is not Pokemon has any chance at success. I really dislike the look of the Peridots and think that the only route that anyone could have gone after Nintendo and Game Freak’s world-changing creation is painterly or abstract because it’s very much protects them from accidentally mimicking the design of any particular Pokemon.

There will simply never be another game like Pokemon, at least while everything is trying to be it. We need something entirely different and out of the box in order to capture that same lightning in a bottle. I get that the idea of creature collecting and caring is the focus, but maybe it shouldn’t be. It’s human nature to want to collect and upgrade things, so playing off of that can look like a whole lot of things while avoiding the whole ‘alien creatures’ aspect. I mean, I could be wrong though, because Neopets seemed to trail off of Pokemon’s success shortly after the titan’s launch in Japan, but that was closer to the start of the craze.

Let me know in the comments what kind of AR game you’d spend thousands of hours playing and whether or not Peridot is it. I’d personally be super happy if we moved away from the whole flowers and plants theme in AR games and back toward hackers and mind control, but I know Ingress has fallen off hardcore in recent years despite all of the emails I get each month asking me to try the game again.