For Mobile Friday this week is i tried out Infinity Nikki from Papergames on my iPhone 14 Pro.
As you see from this video, Infinity Nikki makes a bad first impression on mobile. first there's an additional 7GB download, then it has to verify the extra data. next it wants to restart the game, which actually means closing the game to the phone home screen. when you restart the game it then spends 4 minutes or so compiling shaders. In all, it took nearly 20 minutes from starting the game to actually getting to play the game. Infinity Nikki is a game that you must start on Wifi, tho i don't remember if ever warning us that it's additional data download wouldn't be suitable via a mobile network.
Graphically, at first glances it looks amazing but if you look around the edges you can see, and not unsee it, that Infinity Nikki is pushing my #iPhone14Pro to it's limits. there is continuous pop-in, to a distracting degree, and the frame rate appears to suffer fairly often. As the end of this video shows, the game still has some bugs, too.
For me, i found it's soundtrack to be just as impressive as the graphics but it too seems to have issues. there are moments when there's no sound and it really sticks out as the back ground music and sound effects in this game is rather good. there were a couple of moments where the chilled relax nature of the soundtrack didn't match the action on screen or the seriousness of the story either.
This mismatch of tone was something i felt throughout the demo. it wasn't just the music. the game has a clothes making mechanic that has no fanfare about it and is just text on screen. whereas the clothes summoning mechanic has more flash around it and feels more of an event. In this video our characters travel to 2 new worlds and seem surprisingly fine about it all. even the locals they meet don't seem to mind a walking talking teddy bear looking character. it reminds me how weird this similar situation felt in the free to play game Palia, https://youtu.be/B-MIuLyos1g. But the one that really stood out the most, and annoyed me the most, was the tutorial. Infinity Nikki has a fantastic tutorial that makes it an obvious choice to gamers who haven't played too many games. and then there are times when the tutorials revert to simple text boxes. it often tells us what button to press to get out of menus, but also at times doesn't. it mostly puts things into context, too, but it completely drops the ball at the Tidal Guidance section.
This leaves the story and honestly, i don't think even after an hour, i fully know what's happening. Infinity Nikki seems to be a bit of a slow burn at the start and i wouldn't be surprised if it would take another hour or two to fully grasp what's happening. We're teased something about our mum, in the first place we visited, but our character seemed not to notice it. We didn't learn too much about the second world we're in or if we're meant to do more than just find the mythical clothes.
I can't help but wonder if the console experience of playing Infinity Nikki is much better than playing it on iOS. this really did feel like i was playing the lesser version of this game, so much so that i don't think i would recommend it to those who could play it on console. there's the ability to log into the game with a PlayStation account but it never really says if there's cross save between phones and PS5. For many games with rough launches i keep the game on my phone and would check back in on my own time. but for Infinity Nikki, i've already deleted the game.
Version 1.0.1 Played.
