Take the ball scene from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, swap out the wailing paraphernalia for an army of chibi cats, equip Belle with subtle Doctor Manhattan-level matter-transformation abilities, and you may be Beginning to replicate the experience of Infinity Nikki – an open-world dress-up adventure from Singapore-based infold and former Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild developer Kentaro Tominaga.

The trailer was revealed this week at Gamescom 2024. It’s the fifth installment in the mobile-focused Nikki series so far, and it looks to be a huge success, with over 12 million pre-registrations so far (many of those due to the prospect of shared unlockable in-game bonuses, though). It’s also a free-to-play game, and I have the usual unanswered questions about currencies and gacha elements, but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt for now, as I haven’t spent nearly enough of my life thinking about the tactical uses of prom dresses. Here’s the trailer.

Some plot threads from a recent preview from Ian Games: Princess or princess-like heroine Nikki is searching her closet for an outfit when she discovers an enchanted dress. The dress immediately kidnaps her and drags her through a portal into the glittering, 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 miraculous outfits.

Along the way, she’ll pick up a ton of other new looks that give her different powers and abilities – fishing, moving around stealthily, operating machines, catching bugs, shrinking herself so you can ride around on your pet Mogryll Cat’s head. It’s the wardrobe-based fistfights of Final Fantasy X-2 applied to open play. Don’t despair at the lack of overtly warlike elements, for war is nothing more than fear wrapped in taffeta, and the hem is mightier than the sword.

There Is Combat, aka monster scavenging, but it’s not played up too much. Enemies have names like Bouldy and are sometimes literally made of materials for fancy dresses. The land seems to be populated mostly by tailors and stylists, rather than the usual brooding blacksmiths and weapons dealers. Zeldary touches abound: you get a Pear-Pal slate similar to the Sheikah Slate from Breath Of The Wild, which is mainly used for photoshoots, and one of the dresses lets you glide. There’s also a dungeon of sorts with platforming sequences: one of these consists of a dream warehouse full of paper cranes representing wishes. Completing it lets you fly away on one. Some other things you can ride: magic trains, bikes, mine carts in wine cellars, and a damn big bird that follows a fixed route around the map.

I’m pretty charmed? I fully expect the as-yet-unspecified monetization elements to be as wild as the graphics are saccharine – it feels like it’s aimed squarely at magpie children who have unregulated access to their parents’ bank cards. But I like the idea of ​​an open world explicitly based on leisurely costume collecting, in that dressing up is secretly the best part of many games – including games that supposedly frown upon such frivolous diversions because “look, I’m a serious art form” or “dressing up is for girls”. Let’s put it this way: Dark Souls has a fashion scene. Anyway, you can read more about Nikki and her activities on the Epic Game Store.

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