Infinity Nikki review

pcgamer.com:

What happens when you take a long-running mobile game series all about dress-up, wrangle it away from its cellular origins, shove the concept into a Genshin Impact mold and unleash it onto PC and console? You get Infinity Nikki, Infold Games' fifth entry in the series, but the first one many will have likely ever heard of.

What is it? An open-world adventure with pretty outfits.

Release date December 5, 2024

Expect to pay Free-to-play

Developer Infold Games

Publisher Infold Games

Reviewed on Nvidia GeForce RTX3070, AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, 32GB RAM

Steam Deck N/A

Link Official site

Don't worry though, you don't need any knowledge of the previous games to jump in. Infinity Nikki doesn't directly follow on from any of its predecessors, but it does retain their main themes: A human stylist named Nikki and her sassy talking cat Momo end up getting sucked into Miraland, a fantasy realm stuffed with all kinds of fashion-related lore and a history that implies some sort of war among eight garment wizards.

At least, I'm pretty sure that's what's going on, from what I've gleaned. My history with the series lies almost entirely with Love Nikki, the third game in the series, one which I remember having a heap of translation issues and an oft-confusing narrative. Huge improvements have been made for the former, but the latter still remains. Dialogue was occasionally entirely unnecessary—one moment where I had to listen to Nikki back-and-forth with a character over the fact they repeated a sentence had me questioning my sanity—and concepts are either over-explained or under-explained.

I went through a good chunk of my time not really getting anything, narratively. There are a ton of lore books knocking around though, which I found helped to add a ton of much-needed background history to Miraland, giving me more insight into what was actually going on around me. I often preferred these flavour texts to the main narrative, and as I read more I was having a much easier time piecing