Everyone loves dressing up in video games. Ever complained about a lack of transmog? That’s because you yearn for a dressing up box. Sorry, but your Death Killer helmet with horns and sharp edges and bad stats is really just a tiara. That cape with the bleeding skull logo? It’s a tutu my friend. We play video games to lose ourselves in the fantasy, to forget about real life, to escape. It’s the same reason we dress up as children.
This is not a particularly original thought. RPGs have always had a little bit of dressing up about them – you design your coolest possible character then put them in your favourite clothes. Pretty much every year since gaming began has indulged in a little bit of dressing up. But 2024 has been special. There are three games this year, all appealing to different audiences, that feature dressing up as a core principle. Let’s rummage around, shall we?
Infinity Nikki Is Dressing Up At Its Most Pure
The obvious example of this trend is also the most recent to join the tea party. Infinity Nikki is the only one that declares itself a dressing up game, more specifically an open world dress up game. Evolving from the Love Nikki series (which was a more standard gacha dress up sim), Infinity Nikki has you wandering the wilderness, gathering new outfits for animal grooming, bug catching, fishing, and, more unusually, electrical engineering.
Collecting new outfits and accessories is the main goal here, and the more typical (if simplistic) puzzle solving and dungeon crawling is balanced out with style contests. These see you given a specific descriptor, like Cool or Elegant, that you need to attain a high score in by dressing to match. The open world elements don’t require specific outfits, but you won’t be able to resist the temptation to customise every few minutes anyway.
Astro Bot Is Full Of The Dressing Up Spirit
Astro Bot does so much so well that we probably don’t think of it as a dressing up game. Certainly not in the way we do Stellar Blade. But is that not at the very core of Astro Bot’s central gimmick? These bots aren’t really Ellie or Kratos or Lara Croft, they’re merely a single signature bot dressing up as them. I was a bit of a cynic before I started Astro Bot, and wary of the PlayStation love in it represented. Then I found myself doing the Leo pointing meme when I saw the Ulala bot.
To be honest, when I rescued a regular bot, I felt a little short changed. Where’s my memorable and/or forgotten PlayStation character? Add to that the unlockable costumes for Astro Bot himself (I played most of the game as Kat from Gravity Rush), and it becomes clear that Astro Box is just a virtual cardboard box that the washing machine came in. Look, we didn’t all have proper dressing up boxes as a kid, okay?
You Loved Dressing Up In Stellar Blade, Even If You Won’t Admit It
The controversy that wasn’t. Despite a lot of hype being made about game journalists hating Stellar Blade and wanting to tear it apart, most people journo and gamer alike agreed that it was a pretty sharp action game but lacked a story and Eve needed more personality. It was the sort of game, a little bit like Ghost of Tsushima, that made me think ‘I bet the sequel is really good‘.
And my favourite parts were the cute outfits. You can tell yourself you were only checking them out because of how little they covered Eve’s silicone-based plastic skin substitute over her mechanical exoskeleton, but really we couldn’t get enough of the fashion in Stellar Blade. It’s a shame Eve lacks the rizz and confidence Nikki and Astro have when turning so many lewks.
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OpenCritic
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Top Critic Rating:
80/100
- Released
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December 5, 2024
- Developer(s)
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Papergames
, Infold Games