Augmented reality game Fairy Trails blazing onto iPhone
But will this camera and compass based affair have a happy ending?
It's not often you find fairies at the end of your garden, and when someone allegedly did, it was later found to be a cleverly conceived fake that fascinated the world.
Thankfully, Freeverse's Fairy Trails has made this supposed myth a reality for the enchanting sum of £1.19.
Fairy Trails, according to the developer's press release, is a "beautiful augmented reality game", and from our initial impressions this describes Fairy Trails quite adequately.
Your aim is to collect fairies, fireflies and butterflies in a jar. The more you capture, the more 'power' you will have to detect the special, quicker fairies.
Okay, so you'd be forgiven for thinking the premise sounds frankly dull and childlike, but the way you do so isn't the case.
Shaking the device powers on the 'detector', see, and then as you move the iPhone around to scan your surroundings with the handset's built-in camera, the creatures appear over the top of the camera's image, as if the iPhone has some magical ability to detect the unseen magical critters (maybe it does – anything is possible with Apple). iPod touch owners, if you're wondering, get to enjoy a pre-rendered forest scene instead.
As a result, Fairy Trails is perhaps not one to play on the bus because you may get carted off in a white van and/or cause annoyance for the other passengers. But that aside, this seems an intriguing way to spend your free time.
The big question is whether or not the Fairy Trails is anything more than a novelty, but at the very least Freeverse's effort may pave the way for other cunning uses of the iPhone in future titles.
