Put on your cutest dress and hop on Infinity Nikki, the open-world game that is all about fashion and exciting exploration.

The game puts players in the shoes of Nikki and her furry companion Momo, who are in search of different outfits that possess magical powers. The game describes itself as a cozy puzzle-solving experience, allowing players to explore at their own pace, getting lost in the open world of Miraland.

Today we are taking a general look at the game, including its gacha systems, gameplay mechanics, graphics, and, of course, the quality of its PC port.

Infinity Nikki is an absolute looker of a game, both looking and running really well on ultra settings, despite being an open-world title. The game’s art direction feels very similar to something like Genshin Impact or Breath of the Wild, although the more realistic world clashes less with the characters since they also look very detailed.

The port we’re looking at today comes with all the expected PC gaming bells and whistles, like ultrawide support, unlocked frame rate caps, customized screenshot resolution, a good amount of graphical settings, and even ray tracing, which is a nice extra to have.

It’s very common for gacha games released on PC to be a slightly enhanced port of the mobile version, but Nikki feels like a true PC release. One surprising thing is that the game actually runs on Unreal Engine 5, making it one of the few titles released for it this year to actually have good performance.

Controller support on Nikki feels a little wonky, as it requires players to manually alter a setting for the game’s UI to display the correct prompts. The game is heavy on menus, and a lot of them are difficult to navigate, as it usually feels easier to grab the mouse and click on whatever you are trying to reach instead of figuring out what path to take with the controller.

As far as the actual gameplay goes, however, Nikki controls great with a gamepad. The game isn’t very demanding of players to begin with, featuring very casual combat and platforming, so whatever you feel like playing it on, including mobile, is more than fine.

Despite controlling well with a gamepad, Infinity Nikki might be one of the few 3D platformers that I would personally recommend to be played with a mouse and keyboard instead. The game feels much faster that way, and the player won’t have to suffer through the confusing and cluttered menus.

Infinity Nikki‘s gacha system is a little disappointing, especially pertaining to the way a “full set” is acquired. Not only does the player have to be lucky ten different times to acquire the outfit they want, but they also need to meet a certain quota of pulls to get the makeup set associated with that specific outfit.

Makeup sets are split between different pull requirements, and what this means is that you need roughly 320 pulls to get a full set of five makeup pieces and accessories for a single outfit. Having to keep pulling gacha to meet an arbitrary number even after you get what you want feels pretty miserable, especially considering how this is real money you are dealing with.

What’s worse is that the outfit system lets you customize both your default outfit and the outfits associated with certain skills, as Nikki changes clothes every time she double jumps or attacks. Equipping a gacha outfit to a skill doesn’t give you the option to include the makeup, meaning that even if you subject yourself to grinding or paying for it, you still can’t use it outside of your default outfit.

One disappointing thing is that Nikki, being a gacha game, does include a kernel-level anti-cheat system called ACE, full name Anti-Cheat Expert. ACE was previously very difficult to remove, and would leave a lot of files and services behind after being uninstalled, also running even when your games were closed, which was very scary.

The uninstall process is now better and doesn’t leave unwanted systems and sketchy drivers on your System32 folder, so it went from borderline malware to a regular bad practice. There’s still no amount of cheating or hacking that justifies the potential security issues that it exposes regular users to due to it being a kernel-level application.

Anti-cheat systems are quickly becoming the biggest vulnerabilities in modern PC gaming thanks to how invasive some of them are, and it becomes difficult to recommend any game that runs them. Even if ACE is “better” now, I still recommend uninstalling it if you only want to try out Infinity Nikki for a couple of hours, because I don’t trust it fully.

Infinity Nikki is a simple game created for a more casual audience that might not be very familiar with gaming, but it does deliver a charming experience filled with cute characters and stuff to do. The open world is packed with activities, and the cast for both the Japanese and English voices do a great job.

The gacha mechanics might be a turn-off for some, but thankfully the game doesn’t seem to hide any skills behind the gacha outfits, so in general it seems to be there for the people who want to play dress-up and craft the perfect outfit. If you simply want to explore the game’s world and complete its story, you most likely won’t have to interact with it too much.

Infinity Nikki‘s world is charming and filled with charismatic characters managing to scratch the itch of a collect-a-thon 3D platformer quite well. The PC port is very good, but it does feature the unfortunate inclusion of the ACE anti-cheat software, so take our recommendation with a grain of salt.