One of 2017’s best games came very early in the year when RAC7 Games released their terrifically unique puzzle platformer Splitter Critters ($2.99)to the App Store. The game had you trying to guide adorable roaming critters to their spaceship by slicing up the environment and then shifting the sliced pieces to create new pathways the little buggers could walk on. It was the type of game that felt like it was built for a touchscreen and not only did we award Splitter Critters our Game of the Week and give it 4.5 stars in our review, but Apple thought it was pretty great themselves and it earned a coveted Apple Design Award during WWDC this past June. So, with so much critical acclaim under its belt, where does Splitter Critters go from here? Into the world of augmented reality, that’s where!

magic.#ARKit #madewithunity #madewitharkit pic.twitter.com/226dlwZquE

— Jesse Ringrose (@jesseringrose) September 7, 2017

Ever since Apple announced their ARKit API during WWDC, we’ve had a great time seeing all the neat things developers have been able to do with an easy gateway into augmented reality. In the case of Splitter Critters in particular, not only is it a cool visual to see the game running on a virtual box inside of the real world, but it has gameplay implications too. The various backgrounds all have real depth inside of the virtual box, so moving your device around to change the camera’s angle will actually shift the pieces of land around, similar to the motion-activated parallax effect we saw introduced to iOS some time ago. In a follow up tweet, RAC7’s Jesse Ringrose says that the ARKit support will likely arrive as an update to the existing Splitter Critters app and appear in the form of a new planet filled with AR-only levels. I love Splitter Critters as is but stuff like this gets me super excited for the official arrival of iOS 11 and seeing just what other sort of magical things developers will think to do with it.