The aesthetics of Infinity Nikki – the open-world dress-up game featuring pink-haired protagonists in a variety of elegant dresses – suggest to me a relatively lighthearted, fairytale narrative. But this week, I’ve learned that I might be completely wrong about that, thanks to an array of items from a previous game in the series that literally rival Dark Souls for their threatening, gothic lore implications.
Last week, a resetera thread highlighted a user-made quiz that tasked players with guessing whether a given item description came from the Dark Souls series or Infinity Nikki’s 2017 predecessor, mobile game Love Nikki – Dress Up Queen. Everything I knew about the Nikki series comes from its most recent release, but I’ve already discussed its pink hair, elegant dresses, and Zelda-inspired open-world, so I assumed this quiz would not be all that difficult.
There are 96 questions to the quiz, but they’re a simple A or B choice – each item description is from either Love Nikki or the Dark Souls trilogy. With only two options to pick, you’d think that a 50% score would be a given, but I’m here to tell you that that was simply not the case.
Now, I’m no Dark Souls lore buff, and I’m sure that a few classic items would be easy wins for long-term fans. But there’s a good number of Nikki descriptions that are entirely at odds with my expectations of that series, and clash nicely with my actual expectations of Dark Souls. As a general rule, I found that anything that mentioned flames or ash was a FromSoft entry, but the words ‘Dark’ and ‘Souls’ were, somehow, no guarantee of the Chosen Undead’s involvement in proceedings.
Eventually, having been bamboozled and hoodwinked by the mobile dress-up game many, many more times than I’d care to admit, I struggled to a final score of 56%. Given the balance of probabilities here, that’s far closer to the statistically likely 50% than I would have liked – in fact, I was only six wrong answers away from that 50/50 ratio. It’s an embarrassing final score, but I’ll attempt to excuse myself by claiming that I simply wasn’t prepared for how dark the Nikki games are. This cutesy dress-up game, it appears, is anything but cutesy.
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