Free dress-up game Infinity Nikki is addictively weird

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When the mafia guys challenged me to a fashion show, I realized Infinity Nikki wasn't just weird; it was the fun kind of weird.

I'd been playing the new free-to-play dress-up/crafting/platforming game for a few hours at that point, having been intrigued by it when it popped up with a bright, gorgeous trailer at this year's Sony State Of Play show. (Contrasting brilliantly with terrible—and lengthy—showings from the already come-and-gone Concord, and this week's other big free-to-play release, hero shooter Marvel Rivals.) The idea of a game where your primary verb was flaunting your best looks, as opposed to shooting people in the head, had a fun novelty, and the game's colorful world felt like a nice antidote to some of gaming's more dreary trends.

Loading Infinity Nikki up on my PlayStation 5 this week, I was fascinated to find that it's actually a pretty fun open-world crafting game with a surprisingly good sense of motion, something of a shock given that the previous Nikki games (which I know only through after-the-fact research) were phone games. Not that there isn't still plenty of that cruft built into the game's structure: Expect to spend your first 20 minutes of a session with the game clicking through "Daily Wishes," gacha pulls for new hairbands, and a deeply convoluted nest of various currencies, all of which take either time, money, or both to acquire and spend on my latest set of shiny shoes. But once you do your chores, the game you get to is actually pretty neat, offering a window into an oddball fantasy world that's basically Pokémon, except instead of battling it out with animals, you show off your finest fits.

Infinity Nikki actually takes a while to get to its "battles," which is somewhat surprising given how prominent they reportedly were in earlier titles. By the time I'd encountered members of the dastardly Ebony Scissors (i.e., Team Rocket, except in shiny versions of mobster clothing) trying to steal sketches from my fellow stylists, I'd already 1) gone through a surprisingly dark prologue, 2) been sent running and jumping across the countryside to gather plants, 3) learned how to groom animals for their fur, 4) encountered the inevitable fishing mini-game, 5) flown a paper crane through a weird little obstacle course, 6), walked through a dimensional gate into what was, basically, a Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild shrine, and about a dozen other side quests designed to fill my extremely fashionable pockets with various useful pieces of lint and dander. (I'd also encountered the game's skill tree, which, hilariously, resembles nothing so much as a giant tombstone, because there's some genuinely morbid shit lurking around the edges of all this color.)

The battle itself was actually kind of dull—it turns out you win "cool" points by just suiting up in your finest fishing waders, suggesting the local bait and tackle shop might be a secret stronghold of haute couture. But I can see how this aspect might get pretty compulsive, once you have more clothes, and more metrics to fulfill; more importantly, the whole concept of thugs roaming the countryside, challenging people to fashion duels lest they have their shit stolen, is goofy enough to charm. (Also, more research suggests that, at least in previous games, the whole fashion-fight thing happened because a dying king cursed everyone to suffer horrifying magical agony if they committed violence against each other? Most metal pacifism ever.)

Will I be playing Infinity Nikki in a week? Probably not; there are too many games out there right now for a gacha-and-grind to hold my attention for more than a few hours. But as a dose of unexpected, extremely shiny weirdness, it hit the spot. If you need an aesthetic palate cleanser (say, after trudging through a load of violent sludge), you could genuinely do worse than loading it up and seeing if its version of "battling it out" hits the spot.