One of Australia’s biggest gaming success stories, Halfbrick, has launched a new experiment into the realm of Augmented Reality with their new episodic title, Shadows Remain. Available on the App Store for iOS 11, the free first episode sets up the game’s creepy narrative, as well as demonstrates the possibilities that AR open up.

I’ve played through the first episode of Shadows Remain, and so far I’ve found it to be an interesting take on the hidden-object genre that’s commonly found in mobile puzzle games. Shadows Remain uses your device’s camera to overlay and ‘anchor’ a virtual room onto any appropriately sized textured surface in the real world. You can physically examine every part of the room just by moving around looking through your device’s screen, like a window into the virtual environment. It’s pretty impressive, especially as it never lost its ‘anchor’ or tracking using my iPhone X, no matter how much I shuffled around.

The first episode of Shadows Remain is brief, but there are still a few rooms worth of content to get through. Gameplay is largely based around the hidden-object style, as you need to find a set number of story-related items in each room before you’re allowed to progress. However, the addition of AR to this style adds a wrinkle – traditionally hidden-object games use painted, static backgrounds and limit your viewpoint, thus limiting the information available to you and allowing the developers to manipulate what you can and can’t see. When you literally have complete control over the camera using AR, it simultaneously makes the entire exercise easier and more difficult, and I’m curious to see what Halfbrick can do to change up the formula for future episodes.

There are also occasional puzzles which play around with perspective, and require you to physically move around to find the right angle to progress. It’s a clever use of the AR technology, and something which I’d like to see more of in episodes down the track.

Of course, this isn’t Halfbrick’s first venture into the world of virtual/augmented media, as Fruit Ninja VR showed the company has an interest in more immersive projects. Where the company takes Shadows Remain from here will definitely be interesting to see, but if you want to check out the game for yourself, then head on over to the iOS App Store and download the first episode, to check out a uniquely creepy experience.