Don’t sleep on Infinity Nikki. It could be 2024’s biggest game

If you thought you knew every major game coming for the rest of 2024, think again. On Wednesday night, Infold Games announced that Infinity Nikki will launch on December 5 for PlayStation 5, PC, and mobile. If you’ve never heard of it before, you’re about to in a very big way.

The upcoming free-to-play game is the fifth entry in the mega-popular Nikki series. It takes what was once a mobile dress-up gacha game and turns it into a full open-world console game with shades of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild peppered in. At first glance, you may be tempted to write it off as niche, but that would be a tactical error. Infinity Nikki will launch at the perfect time, landing in the cross section of multiple trends that have defined 2024. If all goes well for Infold Games, it could smash records. If you’re still a little confused as to why, here are all of the reasons that Infinity Nikki could be a sensation.

The Nikki series is enormous

If you’ve never heard of the Nikki series before, you’ve been sleeping on a giant. Developed by Infold Games, Nikki games are traditionally free-to-play “dress up” games that are all about collecting outfits. They also contain oddly deep lore, something that’s helped the series earn a massive, dedicated fan base over the years. How big is it? The series’ most recent title, Shining Nikki, has over 100 million downloads worldwide. Infinity Nikki is already poised to rise to similar success. Even before its release date announcement, it already had 30 million preregistrations. Even if this was just your average Nikki sequel, it would be a big deal — but it’s much more than that.

Dress-up games are having a moment

Infinity Nikki might be the best example of “right place, right time.” There are two major factors that might catapult it to success. The first is that the dress-up genre is currently experiencing a mainstream boom. While the genre has always been popular among its most committed fans, 2024 brought it even more into the spotlight thanks to Dress to Impress, an incredibly successful Roblox game. While it was first released at the end of November 2023, the game gained popularity this year thanks in no small part to a collaboration with Charli XCX. Since then, the game has only grown bigger and become a massive game among streamers. According to Eurogamer, the game has been played over 2.3 billion times. There’s certainly a hunger for the genre right now, so Infinity Nikki couldn’t be coming at a better time.

The Chinese console game market is also having a moment

The other key factor that could spell success for Infold Games is the Chinese console game market’s current boom. The series, which is developed by a Chinese studio, has long been a major hit in China. Until now, though, it’s exclusively been a mobile game. This year has seen China breaking more into the more traditional console gaming market with enormous success. Black Myth: Wukong is 2024’s most jaw-dropping success story, with the action RPG smashing Steam records on release. It’s clear that there’s an enormous market for console games in China right now, and that should help propel an already massive series to even greater heights.

Breath of the Wild’s designer worked on it

Those two factors may build a foundation for success, but it won’t mean much if the game is bad. Thankfully, that’s not something that Infold Games likely has to worry about. Infinity Nikki has a secret weapon working on it: Kentaro Tominaga, a former Nintendo veteran who worked on several Mario Kart and Zelda games while with the company. Most notably, he was the game designer for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. That’s how you know Infold Games is serious about making an open-world hit.

Hours before the release date announcement, Digital Trends went hands-on with a mobile build of Infinity Nikki running on iPhone. The Nintendo inspiration was immediately clear, as we explored an open world not so dissimilar to Hyrule and even used a dress as a makeshift glider. While the Breath of the Wild DNA is clear, its more obvious parallel might actually be Super Mario Odyssey. The gameplay loop has Nikki collecting stars scattered throughout the world, each of which has a little in-world challenge tied to it. The collect-a-thon setup makes it feel very much like a Nintendo game, but with modern mobile game sensibilities. It’s the same formula that pushed Genshin Impact to success, so there’s good reason to believe that this style will resonate with players here as well.

It’s free

While all of this is important, Infinity Nikki has one true ace up its sleeve: it’s free. Despite being a console game, Infold Games is still deploying its tested mobile gaming free-to-play formula. At its core, it’s still a microtransaction-heavy gacha game where players can spend real money to get outfits. While that might be off-putting to some players, that means that it’ll be much easier to get players in the door. You can expect it to rack up a lot of curiosity downloads across platforms at launch, especially if it achieves the kind of staggering early numbers that turn heads.

Perhaps above all else, Infinity Nikki just seems like the kind of cozy game that a tense world could use right now. It’ll launch just ahead of holiday breaks, which could position it as a casual wind-down game for players. It’s just the right game for the moment, and if all goes well, it could create the mainstream moment that establishes the dress-up genre as a goliath right next to shooters.

Infinity Nikki launches on December 5 for PS5, PC, and mobile.