Modern games criticism has fallen hard into a "break now, fix later" attitude. In the wake of big-ticket car crashes like No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077, games are not being judged as they are, but as they could be— and I can say that I understand that sentiment. This is now an industry where games are being updated to avoid criticism on the fly. Games that fail can gain a steady increase in sales over time by being "fixed," and games that hit their sales needs are allowed to politely wait for DLC to achieve the same effect. Gacha games, with their low barrier to entry and extremely high financial ceiling, might as well be squeezing diamonds out of this industry's coal. And Infold Games, the developers behind Infinity Nikki, are pushing forward with the largest gacha release of the year.

So. Is this game going to rise above those expectations?

No.

To cut to the chase, Infinity Nikki is a cold-cut collectathon. It's styled after Super Mario Odyssey, which is a smart choice for an exploration game, and it has a heavy story focus, which is always a plus. It's a fun, funny adventure through a fairytale landscape. The characters are well-designed and mostly well-written. And the whole thing is tied together under the common banner of the Dress Up genre, which is an old favorite of mine. Introducing outfits to a gacha system is a no-brainer, and it's already in Infold's expertise, so everything is integrated together in the way you'd expect. These things are why the game has gotten such high reviews. From a short-term perspective, the game is exciting and full of things. And for a lot of people, that's enough. It was enough to get it a 9/10 score with IGN.

Unfortunately for IGN, though, Infinity Nikki's bag of tricks is worryingly out of date. It's a closet full of vintage clothes— neglected, long since chewed through by moths and mold, and finally patched together in time for the big Christmas dance. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey are both seven years old. Genshin Impact, which Nikki shares a lot of design elements with, is already four years old. These design blueprints are not going to win any awards anymore. And the Dress Up Game genre is older, sure, but we're patching old dresses with old fabric and even older threads. At some point, it's all going to fall apart, and it happens to be right where you'd expect it— the seams.

The main issue is just finding everything. Whimstars have a proximity detector in the form of Momo's View, but Dews of Inspiration do not. You just have to find and memorize all 2000+ locations on the map. Treasure chests— lifted straight from Genshin Impact— don't have any form of tracking whatsoever. The game won't even tell you how many you still have left to collect. This makes it impossible to find everything unless you're using third-party map software, and every single one of these maps is currently incomplete. Even then, it turns the game into the worst kind of checklist. Huge swathes of the map exist only to be filled with collectibles. There are no NPCs, no new varieties of insects or fish. It's just stars and bubbles as far as the eye can see.

This could all be in service of something much greater... but it isn't. Once you've collected roughly half of all the Stars and Dews, they become immediately worthless. The progression tree is filled out, and the Dew-exclusive outfits are collected, but there are still hundreds of these stupid things lying around. I'm still collecting them, stockpiling them for some future update where any of this actually matters. That's the part where Infinity Nikki's attitude problem rears its ugly head. For all of the outfits, for all of the collectibles and the fishing and the petting of creatures, there is nothing to do in Infinity Nikki. Everything is in service of filling up experience bars, and those bars have an end to them! I have already eaten through the entire battle pass and most of the achievements. Once my Orders rank hits Master Stylist, even the Daily Quests won't give me anything. The only collectible left is raw Stylist XP— the largest experience bar, the least likely to suddenly come to a stop. And it doesn't give you squat.

Sitting here at the end of the game, before the story is even finished, all I can do is whittle away my time at one of the many, many, many busybody tasks around the map. Have I read every bit of lore? Have I interacted with every toy box, every NPC? No, and I never will. You never will, either. The game gets boring way before then. And again, I'm saying this as someone who enjoys the game. I'm still logging in every day, with nothing to do and nobody to talk to. I'm sitting here waiting for the next content update, and the game has barely been out for two weeks. That's just the reality of making a gigantic open-world collectathon: If you don't limit the player's progression, they will eat all of your cookies before you have the chance to put any more in the jar.

There is a way forward, obviously. And by the time you read this, the game may already be well on its way to being a success. But I'm not here to judge Infinity Nikki on what it's going to be. I'm playing it now, and I'm judging it now. This game has ten hours of content that has been stretched out into fifty hours of gameplay, and it sucks. It needs more variety, it needs more things to actually look forward to, and it needs to address its fundamental design problems instead of looking for a band aid fix. It is in dire need of retailoring, and not just for the fit.

I enjoy it, and I refuse to recommend it.