For years, I have found absolutely any opportunity to lore dump about one of my favourite mobile games, Love Nikki. A shockingly good dress-up game with gorgeous visuals and incredibly sloppy translations that obfuscated an already bizarre story where folks waged war with fashion rather than violence. Well, for the most part anyway, until one bloke comes along and murders someone like 15 chapters in. With a sword, even, not a lacy blouse or ballet pump!
I fell off the wagon by the time sequel Shining Nikki came around, but you can bet I've been back on board ever since the announcement of Infinity Nikki in 2022. It's the first time the series has ventured beyond mobile, with plans to release on PC and console, blending its traditional dress-up gameplay with action and exploration. As soon as I discovered it had a giant booth at Gamescom this year I just knew I had to check it out.
As I stood in the queue, trying to glance at one of the many demo stations, the first thing I immediately noticed was its UI. Infinity Nikki shares that Hoyoverse-ass interface that we've seen spread out into other games like Wuthering Waves and Tower of Fantasy. I'm not sure why it's become the norm, but I feel like I've been conditioned to know what to expect out of a game that's utilising it.
Maybe I'm just confirming my biases here, but as soon as I got my hands on Infinity Nikki, it was exactly what I had expected after seeing the UI: A dress-up Genshin Impact. Don't get it twisted, I say that with zero malice because I absolutely loved my time with the game. I was only able to nab around 10 minutes of playtime on the demo station, and if I hadn't had actual adult responsibilities to attend to I would've happily queued up and given it another whirl.
Instead of a large cast of waifus and husbandos to switch between, it's just protagonist Nikki and her cat companion Momo. The swapsies fun comes from Nikki's outfits, which she can don to traverse platforming puzzles, fish, catch bugs and purify creatures dotted around the map. In the demo I was only able to select one outfit per action, but I assume there'll be more choices for each one further down the line.
The outfits I was able to get my hands on during the demo were utterly gorgeous, though. There's definitely a reason Shining Nikki—the other 3D Nikki game in the series—regularly has its clothing and hairstyles ripped by modders for other games (shh, I didn't tell you that). Extravagant, detailed dresses, adorable dungarees and wellies were just some of the options available. As well as action-specific fits, I could dress up Nikki in a whole assortment of mix-and-match pieces.
Being able to pick from tons of hairstyles, outer pieces, and accessories is the quintessential Nikki experience, and I noticed many of them also had different category tags similar to previous games in the series. I wasn't able to deduce how they'll come into play during the demo, but I can't wait to create some monstrous combinations to fit some random NPCs idea of what an "elegant" outfit looks like.
Now I know I said all the dress-up parts have been smashed together with action and open-world exploration, and those things were definitely present during my time with the game. As I headed towards a quest, I was inundated with small platforming puzzles to complete. They were all relatively simple, mostly requiring me to glide from one spacious platform to another. While I am a sucker for it, especially when it involves collecting little doodads and trinkets along the way, I do hope Infinity Nikki has some more complex traversal tucked away across its map.
While I have faith that the game will be able to pull off some more challenging platforming puzzles, I'm less convinced by its combat right now. Though I only had a few brief encounters they were all painfully simple. I stayed back at a distance, shooting ranged projectiles at creatures and killing them in a few hits. Some of them would retaliate with a projectile of their own, but they were incredibly easy to avoid.
I get that Infinity Nikki isn't gunning for balls-to-the-wall action combat, but right now it feels like the game doesn't trust its players to have a speck of battle-oriented comprehension. I would love for it to be just a tiny bit more demanding, which I can hopefully find with its bosses or perhaps some domain-style challenge seen in similar games.
Despite my concerns that certain aspects are leaning a little too simple, my time with Infinity Nikki absolutely left me wanting more. From just the small segment of the map I explored I was grinning from ear to ear, soaking in Miraland's gorgeous environments and every tiny detail on Nikki's clothing. I'm undeniably giddy to see a long-time favourite series of mine break out of mobile jail, and Infold Games has already done a great job of making Nikki feel right at home on PC and console.
