Four years ago Genshin Impact successfully beat the 'Breath of the Wild clone' allegations and with its viral popularity made gacha games mainstream for western PC gamers where they'd never been popularized before. Now, Infinity Nikki has a similar opportunity at success: beating the 'Genshin clone' allegations and popularizing dress up games on PC where they've never previously hit mainstream.
Infinity Nikki is set up to strike a very hot iron while everyone is completely primed to get into another dress up game.
Infinity Nikki is the newest game in a series of dress up fashion gacha games that were previously mobile only. My colleague and Nikki series fan Mollie Taylor jokingly boiled it down to "dress up Genshin Impact" when she got to play it at Gamescom this summer. After playing at least 15 hours of it in the past week—it might be more like 20 but I lost count—I can concur. Except I lost interest in Genshin Impact about 10 hours in and I'm still playing Infinity Nikki until Infold Games rips this test account out of my fashion-obsessed fingers.
Infinity Nikki is an open-world adventure in which a young stylist gets Narnia'd into a place called Miraland with a thing called the "Heart of Infinity" that was implanted in her chest by a goddess who looks like she fell out of a Dark Souls game. After her audience with Ena the Curator and vague direction to seek out the "miracle outfits," Nikki lands in an idyllic grassy countryside outside a town called Florawish where outfits are everything.
The first bit of kit that Nikki gets introduced to are her ability outfits. One grants the ability to double jump and float across gaps. Another is a basic attack spell for "purifying" little cloth-based enemies like sad sacks and bitey bags. There's an outfit for fishing, one for collecting hair by brushing animals, and one for solving little wire grid puzzles, all of which I've so far unlocked through the main story quest. Why does a stylist need to spend time fishing and grooming dogs? Obviously because pony hairs and whole live fish are equally valid materials for crafting clothes.
Outside of the ability outfits, I collect all sorts of other clothing pieces that are individually rated in the five basic styles: elegant, fresh, sweet, sexy, and cool. I have a pair of jeans that's rated A for "cool" but D for "elegant," for example. All over Florawish, Nikki helps solve the people's problems by donning the right outfit. An artist needs inspiration for a statue which I provide by tossing on a dress inspired by a legendary old mayor. A young boy isn't sure what kind of pants he should wear to exercise so I show off a pair of track shorts I crafted for him.
In Florawish, fashion is life. You know how in Pokémon the entire world seems to revolve around Pokémon trainers and that's somehow the basis for an entire economy and like half the workforce? Yeah, that's what being a stylist is like in Florawish, where the only building bigger than the mayor's house is the Stylist's Guild.
Nikki quickly gets embroiled in battles between stylist factions like the Ebony Scissors or Golden Daisies. Battles between stylists also have a nostalgic Pokémon tone with enjoyably corny lines like "Snip! Snip! You're going to lose. Prepare to cry!"
The actual fashion contests are a little bit dry, though. A challenger will give a theme like "summer" and a style like "cute" and I need to scroll through all my many outfit slots for hair, hats, tops, socks, shoes, several kinds of accessories, hovering over each item to check its rating in each category. I get points based on items matching the challenge style and their rating. It's a bit of a guessing game where I just try to assemble a cohesive outfit on theme while using the highest rated items and hoping they'll net me enough points to win.
In the early hours of the game, using pieces of my ability outfits with their S-tier ratings in various categories is plenty enough to get by. Later on, I suspect that won't quite cut it, and I'll need to find some "SS" tier pieces to complete quests or challenges successfully. That's where the gacha bit comes in.
If you've dipped your toe in Genshin Impact or Honkai Star Rail in the past four years, you'll have most of the necessary street smarts for Infinity Nikki. It has several different currencies to keep track of, some earned by exploring, others that can be exchanged into resonite crystals. Those are used for buying the loot box-like gacha pulls—referred to as "resonating," in Nikki—and the rewards are certain rare and high-tier clothing pieces. Just like how Genshin has highly-desirable five star characters, Nikki has "SS" rated clothing pieces, many of which I'm sure we'll find are tucked away in the limited time gacha events.
If that wasn't enough, Nikki also puts more gacha inside your gacha. In addition to the premium currency "resonating" activity, there's an actual little capsule toy machine (which is where the term "gacha" comes from) outside the stylist's guild called the Surprise-O-Matic. You can pay blings, the free currency found while exploring that refreshes daily, to get a little outfit piece prize. There are some shops in town that just outright sell outfit pieces for bling without the gachapon element though.
Outside of all that Nikki is stuffed to the seams with little side activities. It has some physics puzzle challenges reminiscent of Breath of the Wild, a flying paper crane game minigame, hidden object photo challenges, on-rails platforming challenges, and observation quizzes. There's a tiny bit of combat too, though not anything worth getting fussed over. Most enemies can be dispatched with Nikki's basic ranged "purify" attack in one hit, though I did eventually find some enemies that would block my attacks until I flanked them.
What I need you to understand is that I'm a build mode person. Almost any game can hand me a building system and I can play with that for hours, sans any other real goal. But creating a character and choosing their outfits, though something I enjoy, I get bored of without some extra sauce. Like, I enjoy broccoli but I do get a little tired of it if there isn't some cheese on top. Infinity Nikki's open world is a whole fondue pot of cheese, to me. A whole lot of dress up built on top of a lovely open world full of puzzles and challenges to keep my brain tickled.
I don't think Nikki is necessarily innovating in the gacha space (or in the open-world platform puzzling space either). It's sliding down a groove that Mihoyo has been carving into PC gaming for four years. But it does come at an auspicious time. Everyone I knew was absolutely head over pumps for the Roblox PvP fashion game Dress to Impress last month. Infinity Nikki is set up to strike a very hot iron while everyone is completely primed to get into another dress up game.
Infinity Nikki is going through a couple different closed beta tests this month on both PC and mobile. There's no official launch date yet, but its App Store listing with a placeholder December 31 launch date has fans anticipating it will launch before the end of this year.
