Fashionistas and gacha enthusiasts (there are dozens of us) rejoice, because Infold Games has finally announced the release date for Infinity Nikki, the developer's dress-up take on Genshin Impact.
The open-world fashion adventure is landing on PC on December 5—alongside mobile and PlayStation 5—and I for one am incredibly jazzed about it. It's the perfect intersection for me, hitting all of the dress-up stuff I grew up with as a kid, but contained within a Hoyoverse-ass open world with platform puzzlers and explorational activities. I'm also a well-documented Nikki sicko at this point, having been into the series since 2017.
I even managed to successfully rope in fellow cosy games enjoyer (read: sicko) Lauren Morton during the game's October beta, which left her "convinced" that "dress-up games are about to go mainstream".
Anyway, Infold Games has marked the launch announcement with a brand-new trailer that seems slightly less fever dream-ish than the one it showed back at Gamescom, with more hints at what we can expect to be doing—fishing, creature capture and the like—with an admittedly banging theme song courtesy of Jessie J.
There's also been a rather sweet letter from series producer Runhao Yao which has been posted across the game's social media, which mentions that Infinity Nikki's release date is a special one. "Twelve years ago, on this very day, we released our first game in the beloved Nikki series, Nikki UP2U: A Dressing Story. Now, our fifth Nikki game is finally ready to meet you."
Yao notes that the first game was "created by just a few of us," with Infinity Nikki now having "more than one thousand people" at the helm. "Bringing this 'one-of-a-kind' project to life has been challenging, with far more complexity in development and management than we ever anticipated," Yao continued. "It's been tough, but our determination carried us through. Our team has always believed in taking on the impossible, and because this was a Nikki project, we were even more motivated and inspired to pursue 'infinity' with everything we had."
It really has been a big leap for Infold Games to take. All four previous Nikki games have been exclusive to mobile, with Shining Nikki being the team's first foray into making the whole thing 3D, and Infinity Nikki being the first entry to go to console and PC. It seems like the developer has jumped a few videogame grades somewhere by expanding it into an open-world game, but from what I played of the beta it's done a pretty bang-up job.
