We learned earlier this week in our SwitchArcade Roundup that developer Picomy’s flying platformer Heroki would be arriving on the Nintendo Switch on July 20th, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve forgotten about their roots on mobile. Today a new self-published version of Heroki ($4.99) has arrived in the App Store bringing with it all sorts of new features, including “full HD support for high-end devices such as iPhone Plus models and the iPad Pro, all running @ 60fps; full support for iPhone X; iMessage Stickers; full support for Apple TV 4K; lots of gameplay improvements and several bug fixes and performance improvements." Heroki was originally released on iOS back in July of 2015 and was published by Sega. According to a post from Picomy in our forums, this is what has happened since that time and why they’re moving forward the way they are:

3 years after Heroki’s release, SEGA was going to discontinue Heroki on the App Store and they decided to give back Heroki free for us to release and support in the future (Which is a great gesture by the way!).

The plan was to transfer their version to our App Store account, but because Heroki uses iCloud, the transfer was technically impossible.

So therefore, we and SEGA searched for the best possible solution and therefore Heroki was also updated on SEGA’s account so that the current SEGA users can still enjoy Heroki on their latest iDevices.

While it’s very cool of Sega to transfer the rights of Heroki back over to Picomy so they could continue supporting it, it’s never a great situation whenever there has to be a separate re-release of a game you’ve previously paid for. At least both parties are trying to make it as painless as possible for existing customers, and if you already owned the Sega-published Heroki you can indeed get the newly-updated version by visiting your Purchase History in the App Store. If you have that original version of Heroki currently installed, you’ll have to actually delete it and then re-download from Purchase History in order to get the most up-to-date version. I’ve just tested and can confirm that this works, but if you have existing game progress you don’t want to lose you might want to hop into the game and make sure you’re backed up to the cloud before deleting and redownloading. If you’re simply new to Heroki and intrigued by the colorful trailer above, then grab the version that’s linked at the bottom of this post, as this will be the version that will continue to be supported in the future, and you can find three year’s worth of impressions as well as current discussion about Heroki in the thread in our forums.