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The road to the App Store for thatgamecompany’s Sky: Children of the Light (Free) has been a long and winding one. The new game from the studio who brought us critically acclaimed titles like Flower and Journey, Sky originally made a huge splash by being announced during Apple’s September iPhone event back in 2017 with the whole world watching. It looked like it could be a distant cousin of their previous Journey, but with a core emphasis on playing online with other people and a control scheme that sees the game being played one-handed with just a single thumb on iOS devices or even the Apple TV Siri Remote. A couple of months later, we posted an interesting hands-on video of Sky being played by thatgamecompany co-founder Jenova Chen which showed off a solid 6 minutes of gameplay. Then just about a month after that, Sky soft-launched in select regions. It seemed like a full release would be right around the corner.

Well, apparently that corner included ALL of 2018 and more than half of 2019, as that’s how long Sky has been in soft launch for. It’s hard to sustain excitement for that amount of time, but then just last month thatgamecompany finally announced a global release date of July 11th for Sky and put the game up on the App Store for pre-order. But of course, the rollercoaster didn’t end there, as a couple of weeks later the release date got pushed back by a week to July 18th. Well that’s technically tomorrow here in the US, but Sky has jumped the gun just a little bit and is available right now in the App Store for free. The game will be iOS exclusive here at the start for an undetermined amount of time, but an Android version has been confirmed, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Sky spill over to other platforms at some point too. I have a feeling this will be a really special one, so hit up the link below to check out Sky: Children of the Light for yourself and drop by the thread in our forums to join in on the discussion.

[applink url="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sky-children-of-the-light/id1462117269"