Tom Marks
There is so much to do in Infinity Nikki – so much that it can sometimes be overwhelming. It’s not long after you learn to run and jump that you’re introduced to multiple in-game currencies, countless menus, and an abundance of color. Then, there are the outfits: hundreds of adorable clothing pieces, accessories, and makeup options across its beautiful fantasy world. A lot of that is inherent to the Nikki games, a dress-up gacha series that was previously mobile-only. It has the saccharine visuals, outfits ranging from the basic to the fantastical, and the trademark positivity mixed with occasional melancholy in its story. However, Infinity Nikki not only makes the jump to PC and consoles (alongside mobile), it does so while also transitioning from the static dress-up menus of its predecessors to an impressive open world packed to the brim with varied locations to explore, countless items to collect, and charming characters to befriend. It’s rare to see a series make such a huge leap, but Infinity Nikki has somehow done so with grace, landing firmly on two feet clad in a pair of sparkling heels.
Going back to 2012, Nikki games have always been about building out a wardrobe and dressing up the pink-haired (by default) Nikki in any way you choose. Previous entries would have you move from chapter to chapter, compete in styling contests, and gather clothes and accessories – but that was done largely by navigating 2D menus, not running around a 3D map. She’s always accompanied by her best friend and traveling companion, a brash talking cat named Momo, and there’s some dense high-fantasy lore that sometimes introduces strangely high stakes for a game about cute clothes. That’s a quaint formula designed to counteract reality by relying on hyper-girly aesthetics and the simple joy of putting on an amazing outfit and admiring it in the mirror, and while Infinity Nikki shares the same ethos, it expands it into a sandbox world that feels as vast and full as adventure games like Genshin Impact or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Miraland, the fantasy world where much of the Nikki series takes place, is lush and colorful. Every element is designed to be as twee as possible. Flowers glow and NPCs greet you with enthusiasm. It rains, but it never gets gloomy. Even the enemies are designed to be unassuming, with the most threatening I’ve encountered in my 20+ hours being a giant walking boulder. You don’t even “fight” these enemies; instead you non-violently “purify” them with a ball of energy. Nikki herself goes about her business essentially unthreatened – she can get damaged, but she’ll always wake up safe and sound at the nearest fast-travel point if she runs out of health, and regenerates it quickly when out of combat. (I had to test this, because I never actually died.) If I didn’t know better, I’d think every character subsists on a diet of frosting-coated ice cream cake covered in sprinkles. That’s how sugary the world feels — though there are also little bits of ruin sneaking into its corners, like in the Queen’s Palace at the start or the story about war and refugees that’s expertly peppered in.
Infinity Nikki’s incredibly varied but usually bubbly style is most apparent in its clothing. Nikki truly looks stunning all the time, and developer Infold Games has put immense detail into every outfit. In close-ups, you can practically see each stitch and rhinestone, and when she runs or hops, the way her clothes sway looks just like real fabric. Once I unlocked the ethereal Crystal Poems outfit, which is available through gacha pulls and makes Nikki look like a winter princess, I almost never took it off. Even less premium outfits like the maid-inspired Gentle Meowmur or ability outfit Whispering Bubbles add flair to Nikki’s movement. Sometimes it’s worth floating down from a high platform just to watch the dress flow in the air.
It was a safe bet that any Nikki game would try to make its outfits shine, but Infinity Nikki puts that same quality of cuteness everywhere else, too. For example, Miraland’s various fauna are fluffy, round, and sometimes given absurd names. There are the standards here, like regular horses, but then one breed of dog looks like a pomeranian and is officially called a Floof. An unlockable ability outfit lets you gently groom these critters to collect their fluff and feathers for crafting — Nikki isn’t out to skin or pluck a creature in this world. Each animal gets a short wash and their own unique, aggressively cute animation when you do; Floofs roll over for tummy rubs, while bunnies let you clean their long ears and feet. I won’t lie, there were many squeals coming from my office as I played.
Whether this tone works for you or not will become apparent as soon as you boot up Infinity Nikki for the first time. As it compiles shaders on the main menu (which it annoyingly had to do each time I opened the PC launcher), your eyes will be bombarded by what feels like every color on the visible spectrum during a montage of moments you’ll eventually encounter, and that’s all before your ears pick up the flamboyantly perky original theme song by artist Jessie J. It’s definitely a lot, but it’s all in fitting service of a game that you can put in the dictionary alongside the word “delightful.”
Thankfully, the Nikki games have never been one-note on this front. Infinity Nikki’s theme song sounds like a typical anime opening out of Sailor Moon or Super Mario Odyssey’s “Jump Up, Super Star,” but it’s counterbalanced by music that changes as you travel throughout the world. The main score features poppy piano, but moving to the fishing area of the first town brings out a folksy guitar. The story is similarly all over the place, and one moment can have the always optimistic and soft-spoken Nikki using her outfits and styling prowess to help people with problems like taking a picture of a flower, and the next she’s dressing up like a police officer to interrogate a suspect in a vast conspiracy involving false wishes putting people into comas for some nefarious purpose.
This emotional whiplash between light and dark isn’t anything new for the Nikki series, but it works particularly well in Infinity Nikki because it helped make me care about a fantasy story with a tough-to-follow mythos, magic based on wishing, and plenty of proper nouns like Miracle Outfit, Heart of Purity, and Esseling to keep track of. It’s also great for a laugh; I’m not sure why a town is asking a young, pink-haired girl they just met to interrogate a prisoner, but it’s just absurd enough to keep me entertained.
The only distraction from this setup are the bugs I ran into ahead of launch. Audio cuts out over time or doesn’t come in at all, and there were a few areas where I accidentally fell through the floor and had to relaunch from the desktop. An update that rolled out during the review period even broke stylist contests so they would cause a crash instead of activating, hindering my progress after a certain point. With a game of this size, there are bound to be issues, but the important part is that none of the ones I saw took away from my overall enjoyment – your goals are so open ended and there’s so much here that I always had more than enough to happily keep me busy even if I wasn’t able to continue the main story.
Explore to Find the Horses
Infinity Nikki sucks you in with a world just packed with things to do that reveal themselves masterfully over dozens and dozens of hours. You start off in some ruins outside the town of Florawish, where you’ll quickly wander through fields collecting items for crafting before walking around the main square and chatting with various characters. Soon, you’ll learn about Whimstars, special items scattered around the world that allow you to work your way through Nikki’s skill tree. Some are simply in hard-to-reach places and require you to do a little platforming, but others will be disguised as animals you need to successfully groom, blocked by enemies you must purify, or locked behind various simple but sometimes time-consuming puzzles you have to solve. And that’s not even going into collecting the main currency, called Blings, purifying Dews of Inspiration that you can turn in for special outfits, or just… exploring for the sake of it.
Infinity Nikki is at its best — aside from its fashion, of course — in how it lures you from the beaten path. As I’m riding my bike (yes, there is also biking!) around the map, I have to stop every five seconds to check out something in the distance. I’ve gotten lost purifying monsters, petting horses, exploring caves, or just finding out if that conspicuously big leaf is actually a trampoline and, if so, what I will find when I jump on it. This may look like other open-world fantasy games, but little touches like the satisfyingly floaty double jump or objects like bouncy nets let you explore in a slightly different way.
You could spend hours running around the starting area of Florawish or the fields and caves right outside it, but venturing elsewhere is always worth it. For example, I initially thought that the only dogs in this land were Floofs, but heading to the rival town of Stoneville introduced me to Bowlers, which are huge off-brand Saint Bernards. You’ll also find different enemies that’ll reward new crafting supplies, new bugs like Witzles (which you can only find in ruins and breakable crates) to catch, and, if you’re interested, new lore. There’s even a train-based mission that you’ll only find much later on, and it’s one of the notable moments where Infinity Nikki successfully switches up the tone from upbeat to spooky.
You could skip all this in-depth exploration, too (not that you should). Following just the main quests as they come in means you won’t unlock things like the bicycle or find certain crafting items for a long time since they’re tied to certain locations, but because Infinity Nikki is so loose with when you need to complete objectives, you could make these discoveries out of order or whenever you want. In fact, you could theoretically travel straight to the area on your map where you can rent a bike, which lets you get to new towns more easily, before you get the quest telling you to do so. There are no deadlines and nothing like the level gating of an RPG open world, so you’re truly free to do whatever you want.
You’ll even get the joy of exploration through Infinity Nikki’s menus. Yes, really. The tutorials lead you through the basics, such as using your handy tablet called a Pear-Pal (get it?), but you’ll discover even more over time by clicking around the menus after completing a task. That’s how I realized you can upgrade Momo’s camera by capturing photos of specific locations to fill up a photo book. The photo mode is initially basic, but unlocking skills in one of three trees in the camera menu gives it new features like filters and poses that make it more fun to experiment with. I was probably a dozen hours into my playthrough before I learned that (you get that pro-tip for free!) and realizing something like this can be frustrating since it feels like you’ve unknowingly missed out on potential boosts or rewards, but since you’re never forced to do anything specific, that feeling goes away quickly. And, to its credit, this gradual rollout of features keeps Infinity Nikki fresh over a longer period of time.
A Mobile Game Through and Through
Despite being on both consoles and PC, Infinity Nikki is still a free-to-play mobile game at heart. And like many of its ilk, it has lots of different currencies to spend across many different menus — so much so that it can be hard to keep track of what you need for something and then where to turn it in once you get it. I often had to randomly click through multiple menus before I found the one I was actually looking for, and I’m sure that’s not an uncommon experience.
Buried within them are even more things to do, where you can obtain even more currencies by turning in quests or completing tasks. Unless you read their flavor text and instructions closely, you might not even know what these goals entail – you just know that doing something will reward you with experience, Diamonds, resources, or maybe an entirely new currency you’ve never encountered before. All the menus are either in your Pear-Pal or on the UI at the top of the screen, and a red dot will notify you when there’s a reward to claim, so thankfully you don’t actually need to know how anything works right away to make forward progress.
For example, there are weekly tasks you can fulfill to get experience in Mira’s Journey, which is just a fancy name for Infinity Nikki’s battle pass. As in other free-to-play games, there are two levels to it: a free one that’ll net you some rewards, and a premium one that’ll reward you even more, including special outfits and premium currency. The Mira’s Journey available during the review period was called Distant Anthem, and it didn’t feature a lot on the premium track to tempt me to buy it beyond a new cloak for Momo at level 30 and another when completing it fully.
Rather confusingly, your Mira’s Journey levels are not the same as your Mira Level. Free-to-play mobile games are always inundating you with things like this, each with their own unique objectives and rewards, because it keeps you clicking around even when there’s nothing to do. It also ensures you’re always earning something by playing, even if it’s just a couple bits of currency or, in the case of Infinity Nikki, basic crafting supplies. For example, there are Daily Wishes, where completing five out of six objectives will net you some goodies, but you’ll fill them out easily enough just by playing like normal. It takes no effort on your part, and you still get a treat – and Infinity Nikki gets a few more menu clicks out of you. This isn’t a highlight of Infinity Nikki, but it is par for the course in this genre.
Speaking of which, if you thought the menus were tough to keep straight, the countless currencies are even trickier. Bling is the main one and can easily be obtained either by picking up floating, glowing crystals while wandering around the world or by completing quests. Diamonds are a premium currency used to purchase special outfits or unlock Resonite Crystals, which are then used for the gacha that gets you other cosmetics. Spend a Shard and you can pull from a pool of clothing and accessories to hopefully obtain the individual pieces that make up four incredibly fantastical five-star outfits. Pulling three-star duplicates grants you 10 Tranquility Drops, which… quite frankly, took me far too much menu digging to even find out they were used in a “Pity” system to not punish you as much for duplicate pulls. Finally, Stellarite is purchased with real-world money and can be used to buy Diamonds and other exclusive outfits.
There might be too many currencies, but it’s all in service of Infinity Nikki’s endgame: collecting as many outfits as possible, whether it’s with real money or not. That means it’s time to talk about the dreaded M-word: microtransactions. After a decade of perfecting the mobile Nikki gacha systems, Infold didn’t have to innovate much to implement the same thing here. Infinity Nikki’s microtransaction strategy simply takes advantage of your FOMO (fear of missing out): You can craft and pick up plenty of stunning, intricate outfits without ever spending a dime, but the coolest outfits will always either cost money or be in the gacha pool. Spending real-world money can also help you fill up your wardrobe faster – sure, you can complete a steampunk lolita outfit by turning in Dews of Inspiration, but that’s time consuming. Why not just dump Diamonds into Resonite, or purchase the outfit of your dreams outright? At the time of this writing, the most expensive outfit costs 2,980 Stellarite, which is slightly less than $50. Things can quickly get out of control for your wallet if you don’t “budget wisely,” as the Infinity Nikki store reminds you at the top of the menu.
Importantly, none of the outfits you can win from a pack or nab with a lucky pull are required if you want to move forward in the story or exploration of Infinity Nikki. Getting a fancy outfit might make it easier to win stylist encounters, which ask you to earn the most points you can by meeting specific prompts with the clothes you wear, but those are pretty easy to succeed at without them in my experience. In Love Nikki and Shining Nikki, purchasing more elaborate clothing options or accessories could help you against other players in PvP styling competitions, but there isn’t any multiplayer here beyond leaving little photography impressions for other players to find and a friend system (although Infold could always add more down the line). It’s all for you, which makes resisting the temptation to spend a little easier.
So, as in any respectable free-to-play game, spending real money is not something you have to do in Infinity Nikki, which should allay any worries about unfairness. However, some of these outfits do still cost a lot of real-world cash if you decide to pay up, which can start to feel exploitative either way. It’s also tough to say how obnoxious these systems will be in practice, as the review copy came with an unrealistically large amount of both Diamonds and Bling so that we could test out everything Infinity Nikki had to offer, but that also makes it trickier to say how this economy will fare over time. Free-to-play games often make it easy to gain premium currency in the beginning and then slow it down as you get further in, and that was always the case in the other Nikki games. But even if you don’t spend a dime, it’s easy to have at least a few dozen hours of excellent exploration and adventure for free in Infinity Nikki before you’ll even start to consider walking away.
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