Load of ballgowns
Take the ballroom scene from Disney’s Beauty And The Beast, swap the wailing utensils for an army of chibi cats, endow Belle with low-key Doctor Manhattan-grade powers of matter transformation, and you’re perhapsbeginningto approximate the experience ofInfinity Nikki- anopen worlddress-up adventure from Singapore-based Infold and former Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild developer Kentaro Tominaga.
Some plot gleaned froma recent Ian Games preview: princess or princess-adjacent heroine Nikki is rifling through her wardrobe for an outfit when she discovers an enchanted dress. The dress promptly abducts her, yanking her through a portal into the sparkling Narnified Hyrule that is Miraland. Here she meets a cursed goddess, Ena, who tasks her with saving the world from evil using the power of the lost Miracle Outfits.
Along the way, she’ll snatch up a bazillion other fresh looks that bestow various powers and skills - fishing, stealthy movement, mastery of electronics, bug-catching, shrinking yourself so you can ride around on your petMooglecat’s head. It’s the costume-based verbing ofFinal Fantasy X-2, applied to open worlding. Do not despair of the absence of expressly warlike elements, for war is but fear cloaked in taffeta, and the hem is mightier than the sword.
Thereiscombat, aka monster purification, but it’s played light. Enemies have names like Bouldy and sometimes literally consist of materials for posh frocks. The land appears to be populated chiefly by tailors and stylists, rather than the usual brooding blacksmiths and arms dealers. Zeldary touches abound: you get a Pear-Pal tablet akin to Breath Of The Wild’s Sheikah Slate, which is used principally for photoshoots, and one of the dresses lets you glide. There are also dungeons of a sort with platforming sequences: one of them consists of a Dream Warehouse full of paper cranes that represent wishes. Complete it, and you’ll get to fly away on one. Some other things you can ride on: magic trains, bicycles, minecarts in wine cellars, and a bloody great bird that follows a fixed route around the map.
I’m fairly charmed? I am firmly expecting the so-far-unspecified monetisation elements to be as savage as the visuals are saccharine - this feels like it’s aimed squarely at magpie children with unregulated access to their parent’s bank cards. But I dig the idea of an open world explicitly built around gladragging, inasmuch as playing dress-up is secretly the best part of many games - including games which ostensibly frown upon such frivolous distractions because Look Here, I Am A Serious Artform or Dress-Up Is For Girls. Put it this way:Dark Soulshas a fashion scene. Anyway, you can read more of Nikki and her doings onthe Epic Game Store.
