“Infinity Nikki is the stylish open-world game that players have been begging for.”
- Rich world-building
- An enormous amount to do
- Approachable gameplay
- Tons of outfits to collect
- Boilerplate world design
- Very buggy at launch
- Watch out for microtransactions
How fitting is it for Infinity Nikki, a game about wish-making, to itself feel like a dream come true?
Even with a wealth of genres at its disposal, the big-budget video game industry caters to a surprisingly narrow audience. The biggest games of any given year tend to be blockbuster spectacles with an emphasis on action. Anything that doesn’t fit into that category is generally either aimed at kids or falls into rigid genres like sports, racing, and strategy. There are fewer options, though, for those who crave something gentle, sweet, and stylish that still retains the scope and depth of a large-scale production. Why is it that we can get a Call of Duty game every year like clockwork, but not one massive Barbie game in the modern era?
In that sense, Infinity Nikki is as close to a perfect video game as it gets. The free-to-play open-world adventure is every bit as grand as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but it subs out fantasy swordplay for runway fashion battles. For a certain kind of underserved player, one who has had to stick to the thriving indie scene or roll the dice with mobile games, Infinity Nikki is a miracle.
Combining DNA from Zelda, Animal Crossing, Mario, and Genshin Impact, Infinity Nikki is an infectiously delightful adventure. Even if its Nintendo inspiration and aggressive gacha monetization aren’t in perfect harmony with one another, a game like this shouldn’t be this rare.
Welcome to Miraland
Infinity Nikki is the fifth installment of Papergames’ Nikki franchise, a series of mobile dress-up games starring a pink-haired hero with a great eye for fashion. If you’ve never heard of it before, you might know less about what’s popular in gaming than you think. Nikki is as iconic as Link depending on who you ask. The series is such a hit, especially with women, that Infinity Nikki earned 30 million pre-registrations before it even had a release date. It’s easy to see why. The latest entry is an enormous moment for the series, fully realizing its mechanically limited mobile predecessors into a full-blown open-world game. Papergames was so serious about getting that transition right that it brought in Breath of the Wild designer Kentaro Tominaga to help.
That effort didn’t go to waste. As a free-to-play game, Infinity Nikki is a staggering release that doesn’t sacrifice any piece of the series in its scope increase. The story kicks off when the bright-eyed Nikki and her cat pal Momo are once again transported to the magical world of Miraland, a wonderland where stylists are superheroes. The duo is roped into a mystery after discovering that Miraland’s wish-making residents are falling into comas. It’s the kind of typically bizarre Nikki storyline that makes the series so special. Deep lore about a raging religious war coexists with an adorable mission about a magical “Choo Choo” train-turned haunted house. It’s not afraid to be bright, bubbly, and pitch black in the same breath.
I found myself completely endeared to Nikki.
Infold Games goes to impressive lengths to build out the mechanics of its world. Nothing is random. While exploring a rolling plain, I start to find little bounce pads that can launch me into the air. It’s a typical piece of open-world design that I’d usually accept as unexplained game logic. At one point, though, I bump into an NPC who explains that the pads were actually mechanisms that were thought to launch wishes into the sky. Now they litter the world, giving them a functional reason to exist. That level of thought and care goes into everything. Each animal I find, for instance, has a fashion twist to them. Pomeranians have cable-knit fur, some fish are shaped like purses, and crows’ feather patterns make it look like they’re wearing little tuxedos. When I groom an animal, I get a crafting material that corresponds to their design, giving me a full sense of how the world’s nature-based economy actually functions.
That level of detail isn’t always translated into the comparatively boilerplate open-world design (though one soundtracked by delightfully eccentric tunes). Miraland follows Breath of the Wild’s playbook to a fault, largely opting for your average green fields dotted with trees and bushes. It’s perfectly pleasant, though its Earthy realism can feel at odds with its fantastical lore at times. It clicks much more in cozy towns and during surreal story set pieces, like one where Nikki rides an enormous paper crane through an impossibly large library.
What makes the world of Miraland work most of all, though, is its hero. Right from the adventure’s opening moments, I found myself completely endeared to Nikki. She’s a good-natured hero who’s immediately accepting of Miraland’s odd dream logic and eager to help in any way she can. She’s sweet and bubbly, but still capable and confident. When she busts up a meeting of nefarious dream grifters, they cower in her presence despite the fact that she hardly raises her voice. Her disappointment is powerful enough.
It’s a character that shouldn’t feel as fresh as it does. When it comes to female heroes in modern mainstream media, even the most progressive heroines can fall into archetypes. Sometimes the instinct is to flip gender roles entirely and place a female hero into the ultra cool, gruff guy role. Nikki, on the other hand, gets to be unabashedly feminine without being looked down on for it. I’m brought back to ’90s TV shows like The Powerpuff Girls, which so effortlessly preached feminist themes by simply letting its superpowered girls kick butt and care about fashion at once. There are no moments where she self-reflexively monologues on the nature of being a woman. The “sexy” outfit pieces she can acquire aren’t designed around a man’s idea of sexiness.
Infinity Nikki may very well be the first, and perhaps only, modern game of its scope built for a female gaze instead of a male one.
Breath of the style
Infinity Nikki’s triumphs aren’t just tied to its rich world-building; this just might be the most impressive free-to-play game ever built. As an open-world game, it’s every bit as fully featured as one would expect from a full-priced console game. It has a fully complete story campaign, a sizable world to explore, thousands of collectibles, several RPG progression hooks, and more gameplay systems than I could possibly cover in one coherent review. Had it launched with a $70 price tag, I don’t think anyone would have batted an eye.
The gameplay flow will look familiar to anyone familiar with Nintendo’s design philosophies, especially in the Switch generation. Kentaro Tominaga’s influence is immediately obvious as my eye leads me around the world instead of map markers. The first gameplay layer lies in its collectible Whimstars that dot Miraland. To get them, I need to solve environmental puzzles, complete quick platforming challenges, and clear miniature shrines a la Breath of the Wild. More than Zelda, though, it reminds me of Super Mario Odyssey and Sonic Frontiers with their playground-like levels full of shiny things to fluidly collect. It’s a winning formula for a reason.
That’s only one piece of a huge picture, though. There are full story missions to complete, a wealth of side missions, fishing, bug-catching, runway fashion battles, clothing crafting, automated material mining, daily missions, and more. It can be a bit overwhelming to take in, but once I got all its disparate pieces down, Miraland felt like a world to be lived in more than a story to be conquered. It has the heart of a life simulator, full of resource gathering and customization, but placed into a fully fleshed-out open-world format.
Where Infinity Nikki really differs from peers like Breath of the Wild is in its approachable design. Rather than relying on control-heavy combat or precise locomotion, each of Nikki’s powers (each of which is tied to an outfit, not unlike Princess Peach: Showtime!) is a breeze to use. Platforming is forgiving thanks to her floating dress power, bug-catching is as simple as swinging a net, and a lot of systems are broken down into easily digestible minigames. Even “combat” is a one-button affair that sees Nikki shooting a purifying ball at weak enemies. That sounds thin until you consider that her “purifying” power is as much of a tool as her fishing rod. It’s a quick action that nets her crafting resources, not a skill-heavy challenge.
My time with Infinity Nikki has been nothing but joyful so far.
I imagine that some seasoned players might find it a little boring, but Infold Games knows its audience well. It isn’t focusing on hardcore players; it’s creating a cozy off ramp for more casual fans of the mobile game. It’s almost a logical next step for Hello Kitty: Island Adventure or Animal Crossing: New Horizons players, taking those games’ cozy hooks and threading them into a soft and sweet open-world structure. Crucially, it does that without infantilizing its players in the process. It doesn’t turn into a “kids’ game” that’s been mechanically watered down for children, like Lego Horizon Adventures. The tombs of lore are still there; the RPG hooks run deep. Rather, it’s just built for players who crave a more laid-back pace in their games.
It turns out that even I’ve been dying for something like this, too; my time with Infinity Nikki has been nothing but joyful so far. I smile every time I groom an undiscovered animal and watch it happily bound around as I do so. I can’t stop hunting for Whimstars, taking me to hidden caves full of secret outfit pieces. Even just the act of softly gliding through the air on a magical flower is a meditative act thanks to smooth movement. Every time I log off for the day, I’m immediately left dreaming about when I can return to Miraland.
All of that joy and ambition does butt up against reality. My early time with Infinity Nikki has been plagued with frequent bugs. Some are inoffensive enough, like a missing voice line here or there. Others have been annoying, like unresponsive button presses in menus. At its lowest moment, Infold Games pushed an update during the review process that entirely broke stylist quests, forcing me to reboot the game if I spoke to an NPC to start a battle. I’m sure the most show stopping bugs I experienced will be ironed out by the time you start playing, but there’s no doubting that Infinity Nikki is disappointingly fragile in its launch state. I’m nervous about how it’ll fare on mobile devices out the gate, which is where I imagine the bulk of its audience will experience it. I’ve been able to play around the pain points since there’s so much to do, but be prepared for growing pains.
The gacha factor
As with any free-to-play game, there’s always a monkey’s paw. While Infinity Nikki can be entirely played as a single-player open-world adventure, it still contains the same DNA as its mobile gacha counterparts. Some story progression is gated behind ranking up, which requires players to log in and complete daily missions a handful of times. There’s a resource-gathering “realm” system where players spend energy to complete challenges or exchange materials, and then have to wait for that energy to refresh every day. There’s a seasonal battle pass — both free and premium — that nets players extra rewards. It’s very much a live-service game built to reward players who log in over time.
To its credit, Infold Games has done a fantastic job of making sure that players who just want to enjoy a great single-player story can do that and leave in peace. There is very little pressure to engage in any endgame systems that require constant attention, meaning you could play its massive wealth of content for free with no strings attached. Even as someone who mainlined some story sections for the purposes of this review, I was only prevented from progressing a handful of times, requiring me to wait a day to clean up some dailies. I still had plenty to do in that downtime, from collecting hundreds of Whimstars to cleaning up a long list of side missions.
But if you’re playing 40+ hours of a game for free, it’s because the publisher is confident that it’s going to make its money back on someone else’s dime.
I can see where players could fall into a money pit.
Infinity Nikki’s main monetization hook is a traditional gacha pull system that you’d find in games like Zenless Zone Zero. Instead of pulling for weapons or characters, though, players pull for special clothing pieces within timed “banners.” Dressing Nikki up is the true draw here, as players can create incredibly detailed outfits from over a thousand pieces at launch. Everything down to her socks and jewelry can be customized, letting players mix and match items to create beautiful outfits. Even as someone who isn’t concerned with style in real life, I quickly became an obsessive fashionista here. I was eager to craft as many clothing pieces as I could and make creative outfits that let me express my style.
I could do that without spending a single penny, as there are a ton of outfits earned entirely through exploration, but there’s a lot to buy. The gacha system, which can be activated using a paid currency, is your typical bit of gamified gambling as players try their luck to pull for four- and five-star outfits. Infold Games says that players are guaranteed to get a five-star item within 20 pulls, so that’s at least some welcome transparency into the odds. On top of that, there’s a shop where players can spend real money on special items. I’ve seen the rates for premium currency, but I won’t get a sense of how pricey those items are until some special items go on sale.
Though I don’t feel tempted to buy anything so far, I can see how many could. Clothing isn’t just for avatar customization; it’s crucial to style battles. Here, players are given a theme and told to put together an outfit that matches it. They’re scored on how well they did, taking into account how on theme the items are and their RPG stats. The battles tied to the main story are a snap, but I’ve found that optional ones aren’t as simple as putting on your best clothing. Players will need to spend resources to level up their clothing or amass rare items to compete. That can be a major grind. Outfits require a chunk of complicated resources to craft and upgrade. Anyone who’s ever tried to paint fans of games like these as “not real gamers” will look like buffoons here; Infinity Nikki is practically a 4X strategy game next to Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
With how complex the dress-up layer is — especially compared to the much-friendlier open-world bits — I can see where players could fall into a money pit. Obsessively pulling outfits and buying rare pieces would certainly help to circumvent the grind of it all. For faithful Nikki fans, none of this will sound new. That monetized dress-up layer is the primary focus of mobile titles like Shining Nikki, and they remain here as more of a deep live-service endgame. I’m more OK with it all considering how much there is to do without so much as doing a single optional style battle (for comparison, Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis’ story is near impossible to get through without ponying up), but players need to know their microtransaction willpower before going in, because you can expect a lot of enticing outfits to come over Infinity Nikki’s lifespan.
And I imagine that lifespan will be very, very long. Even with some unfortunate launch bugs that might stall its acceleration, Infinity Nikki already has the markings of a phenomenon in its early stages. For an enormous swath of underserved players, including but not limited to women, there’s simply nothing like it at this scale. It’s an enormous magical girl game that fulfills the same playful fantasies of Nintendo, Barbie, and Sailor Moon in one breath. It’s the kind of game that will almost make you mad, left wondering why the industry was so insistent on leaving so much money on the table so it could keep chasing the same narrow audiences.
When Animal Crossing: New Horizons launched in 2020, I thought we were on the cusp of an industry sea change. With its instant (albeit circumstantial) success, I figured that every major publisher would rush to court an audience hungry for softer gaming experiences with a good heart at their center. That moment never materialized. Now, with 30 million people already in her army, Nikki may become the general in gaming’s belated cozy revolution. And there’s no better hero to lead that charge.
Infinity Nikki was tested on PC with early access provided by the publisher.
