Part of the reason I don’t like cosy games as a rule is the oversaturation the genre has experienced in recent years. But it’s also something of an ideological aversion. I enjoy the occasional game that doesn’t require much thought, but ‘cosy’ seems to revel in luxury.
We saw that with the viral tweet asking for a Disco Elysium game about a witch looking for her cat. It’s typical of the cosy crowd to want the most About Something video game to instead be about nothing. I thought about this while playing Infinity Nikki. Or rather, while not playing Infinity Nikki, but getting bogged down in menus.
Infinity Nikki Explains Everything In Too Much Depth
Infinity Nikki is a cosy game through and through. There’s a vague adventuring storyline, but it feels weakest when trying to introduce antagonists and give the game some footing. It excels when you’re dressing up in pretty outfits and collecting stars hidden on rooftops. It’s a game that justifies its own consequencelessness.
But it doesn’t make for the smoothest entry. The first stage of the tutorial is fine, going through basics like jumping, exploring, and the simplistic combat in enough depth that less experienced players can get to grips with it, but fast enough that real hardcore gamers who just want to live a pretty princess fantasy aren’t going to get bored. Then there are the menus. Oh, the menus.
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The game has a radial dial for accessing the wardrobe, designing new clothes, and all those sorts of things. Fine. Mostly intuitive. Then it has a second, semi-radial dial on the D-pad for opening up tools like the camera. Less intuitive, but still simple. Around an hour into the game, you get a Pear-Pal, the game’s equivalent of an iPad. This is a menu that is full of other menus, listing tasks and challenges, rewards, further tutorials, quests, codex pages, and the store.
It quickly becomes a bit much, especially for the casual crowd that the game otherwise does an excellent job of catering to. Add in the various currency, the fact ‘store’ means ‘buy fake money with real money’ instead of ‘trade fake money for fake dresses’, and the way the game forces you to use each menu when you first get it as part of an unskippable tutorial, and it’s a poor introduction to the game.
Had I been playing by myself, I likely would have barely noticed this. I’m used to games with multiple menus, gacha currencies, and crafting, so I would have flown through the tutorial slowdowns as fast as I did the ‘hold X to jump further’ one. But I was playing with my wife, and saw firsthand how Infinity Nikki’s desire to filter everyone towards the gacha systems ends up grinding the breaks.
My wife is no slouch when it comes to gaming. She played Baldur’s Gate 3, a far more mechanically demanding game than Infinity Nikki. But BG3 was a rare exception. The last game she played before Larian’s D&D masterpiece was It Takes Two back in 2021. In both cases, part of the reason she stuck with them was because I was there alongside her.
I was watching her play Nikki, and could offer helpful advice (don’t believe a word she says, it was helpful) like reminding her to grab all of the crafting resources as she ran past them. Yes, all of them. Yes, every time. But she was playing it alone, and that meant having to muddle through all of these menus.
Its purpose is obvious – for many, the pulls are the draw here, and everything else in the game is just about earning resources to play the slot machine and hope the pastel beret comes out. Certainly that’s the point as far as the studio is concerned. It’s free to play, and it needs players to engage with the monetisation to survive. But it needs tadpoles as well as whales – a mass community of casual, low-cash but high-time investment players who keep the game alive.
I’m sure enough will stay anyway, but despite looking forward to the game, enjoying dressing up, and appreciating Momo the cat, my wife soon handed me the controller. She’d rather just watch. I tried to get her to push on, but every ten minutes or so a new feature of the Pear-Pal was unlocked with a new tutorial. It wasn’t even that all of these were complicated, they were just so consistently disruptive.
Between the snowstorm of menus, it does return to the casual fashion playground it promises. But after the perfectly pitched gameplay tutorial, it’s a shame some less experienced players who would otherwise love Infinity Nikki will be at best completely disoriented and at worst put off entirely. It’s an unfortunate reminder that whether a game is about something or about nothing, they’re all about the same thing in the end – getting your money.
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OpenCritic
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Top Critic Rating:
81/100
- Released
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December 5, 2024
- Developer(s)
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Papergames
, Infold Games