Okay imagine this. A 26-year-old big, bearded man walks through Gamescom – having drunk three Red Bulls and smoked five cigarettes – and stumbles towards the Infinity Nikki booth. It’s this massive, adorable set-up with rows of PCs along cutesy white booths. I hop right in, finding myself in control of a young lady, as well as her smug cat companion sitting in the basket of a rainbow-coloured bicycle. The proceeding hour has me create new dresses to wear, catch bugs, and clean various cats on the street. This might be the most out of place I’ve ever felt previewing a video game.
And yet, in spite of myself and my pretty firmly established tastes, Infinity Nikki seems to be a real sleeper hit at Gamescom. It’s an odd package, a blend of Genshin Impact‘s open world exploration and Barbie’s generation-spanning appeal to kids who like dressing up dolls. You play as a mystical stylist called Nikki, in a world that seems to unashamedly revolve around creating cute outfits.
One of the biggest cards in Nikki’s tailor-made sleeves is how it looks. Infinity Nikki is a gorgeous game, with vast open landscapes, rich forests, and glistening water. On a macro scale it’s a looker, but what’s especially rad is the finer details are lusciously extravagant too. Zooming in on Nikki’s various outfits shows the stitching in the fabric, with apparent visual differences between material used. It’s nuts.
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