I feel like I’ve been waiting all my life for a serious dress up game, and now two have come along at once. There’s Fashion Dreamer, an evolution of Style Savvy by the same team, and now there is Infinity Nikki, which blows the doors off everything. Infinity Nikki asks ‘what if Breath of the Wild was also a dress up game?’, and the answer is a startling gorgeous adventure that combines my favourite games from my childhood which always felt disrespected and cheap, as well as the best games around right now.
I don’t like to call games ‘beautiful’ very often. We overuse it, and games now take half a decade or more in development and look photorealistic (which many call beautiful), but ultimately have no spark. They’re either too dark, lack any sort of identity, or often both. Infinity Nikki is different. It’s bright and bold with a pastel, fairytale sheen, and an ethereal beauty to it where the world appears to glow. It’s beautiful on purpose, not just as a consequence of looking like a photograph.
We’ve only seen one trailer this far which stresses that the gameplay footage isn’t final, but we see a lot of actual play with puzzles, platforming, and combat over CGI cutscenes, so I’m pretty confident the final game will have the same aesthetic quality. But how does it actually work to make a dress up Breath of the Wild? Mathematically, it’s very easy. The game’s executive producer is Kentaro Tominaga, who was the game designer on BOTW and director of its DLC, while the game is part of the Nikki series of mobile dress up games. In execution? That’s still a bit of a mystery.
In the trailer, we see our character traverse the world in all sorts of ways - she can run and jump, spring into the air off friendly creatures, shrink down to a fairy and be carried by a cat, use her powers to transform vines, and a whole host of other abilities including, yes, using a BOTW-style glider. For each of these powers, she changes costume on the fly, which also happens during the combat segments. All of these changes occur instantly, suggesting a vast world full of secrets to be unlocked. A couple of the clips hint at platforming dungeons too, further adding to the Breath of the Wild feel.
Of course, changing clothing is not what makes a dress up game. Most RPGs have customisable armourr for various buffs, or stances and equipment required for exploration. While Infinity Nikki’s trailer doesn’t focus entirely on the dress up elements, we see towards the end how that comes into play. The Nikki series is a bona fide dress up sim, so we know there’s a track record, but the game is playing its cards close to the corset for how this translates into gameplay.
Nikki looks at an old, dusty book and sees the fashion design notes for a magician’s outfit. A swirl of golden pixie dust later, and she’s suddenly wearing it. I imagine this book will be far more interactive in the full game, and the dress up elements will let us customise different looks, powers, and possibly hunt for materials. It’s always hard to make rewards feel worth it in open world games, but when the customisation is the point, games allow themselves much more room for unlockables.
Infinity Nikki is flying under everyone’s radar, and I only noticed it recently, despite the trailer dropping at the back end of last year. I’m always wary when two genres merge themselves together in ways that don’t feel synergised, but I can’t resist the allure of a dress up Breath of the Wild. Infinity Nikki’s release date is still the nebulous ‘2023’, but I hope whenever it drops, it’s the talk of the season.