Infinity Nikki 《无限暖暖》

Infinity Nikki 《无限暖暖》is a free open-world cosy exploration adventure game with dressing up that’s available on various platforms, including PC, mobile and PS5.

You accompany Nikki and her feline companion, Momo, as they travel across Miraland on a journey to discover its mysteries and uncover the Miracle outfits. Along the way, you’ll discover hidden areas, solve puzzles, complete jumping tasks, play mini-games, find collectables and much more.

As Infinity Nikki 《无限暖暖》 is an extremely popular game, there is plenty of information and reviews online about this game, particularly on YouTube. Therefore, this post won’t focus on my review of the game but instead on what it’s like to play Infinity Nikki 《无限暖暖》in Chinese and my journey with it.

Storyline, Exploration and Stylist Battles

In my view, there are three major segments of Infinity Nikki 《无限暖暖》: the storyline, the exploration and the stylist battles.

The storyline surprised me, as I hadn’t expected such a captivating, emotional and mysterious story — although mostly lighthearted, some parts are pretty dark. In fact, given the cosy feel, particularly from the trailer and promo material, I didn’t expect much of a story at all.

The story in Infinity Nikki 《无限暖暖》is similar to those found in other RPG games, just without the battles, but instead, there’s adventuring, exploration and puzzle solving. This is the first story-driven game I’ve played entirely in Chinese that’s longer than 10 hours.

Besides the storyline, I would say that exploration (with puzzle solving and jump challenges) is the main bulk of the gameplay. Open-world exploration games are a hit or miss for me, but after playing Infinity Nikki, I realised I love stress-free exploration. There are very few monsters on the map, and they’re easy to defeat. So, it’s easy to explore endlessly without worrying about running into an area with monsters or bosses that are way too difficult to defeat or trying to avoid monsters.

The stylist battles take up quite a small portion of the game. Battling all the NPC are required for the main storyline and these can be completed by upgrading the free outfits obtained from the game.

There’s also a fortnightly series of stylist challenges (similar to Abyss in other gacha games). These are very challenging and require upgrading many different outfits to complete. Due to the huge variety of outfit upgrades needed for this, some would consider the higher levels as paywall content. However, the reward given for completing the higher level is very small in comparison to the lower level so it’s not essential to complete all levels every fortnight.

The Gacha

Character gacha games are a type of game that I tend to avoid because I don’t like how much the characters affect the gameplay loop. The characters/units commonly affect the ease of progression and daily tasks. Some games would outright require players to have specific characters/units that are only available from the gacha system to progress effectively at certain stages of the game.

Before the release of Infinity Nikki, I was worried the outfits would drastically affect the gameplay loop, and the outfits would hinder my ability to progress effectively.

Having played Infinity Nikki for over a month, I’m glad to say that the outfits do not affect the general gameplay loop or hinder the ability to complete daily tasks efficiently and quickly. However, they do affect the fortnightly stylist challenges. The reward is pretty minimal compared to the rewards from other areas (such as the login events, dailies and the regular limited events), so I’m not as bothered by this as I would have been in other games.

Although I don’t feel the outfits affect the gameplay much, I find the cost to pull for a full complete outfit set very expensive! Outfits are broken into 9-10 individual pieces, and 5* outfits have three additional colour variations, which require a full set of duplicates to unlock. There is a pity system, which guarantees a 5* every 20 pull and no duplicates until the set is complete, but still, with pity, it could cost over 300 pulls for a full set with all the colour variations.

Again, it doesn’t bother me that much as I’m aware of what I’m getting myself into, so I’m not in the mindset of collecting everything. I’m happy to save up to pull a few times a year for the outfits that I really want.

I’m mainly interested in the exploration and other aspects of the game, so for now, this is acceptable for me. It does not affect my gameplay and enjoyment, and I hope it’ll stay this way!

Playing with Chinese audio and subtitles

I played Honkai Star Rail in Chinese for a few weeks during its initial release, but I struggled to catch everything in the main story. There are also many side quests with long and un-voiced dialogues, which were tiresome to read, resulting in me missing out on portions of the lore.

In addition to dialogues, all the text surrounding other game elements, such as item and skills descriptions, was overwhelming; there’s just so much of it in these gacha games, and they’re all thrown at you within the first hour of gameplay.

As with most open-world games, there’s no way to revisit previous dialogues and cutscenes (there isn’t even a story recap anywhere), so once a scene is missed, there’s no way to go back.

So, thinking I may experience the same issues, I was a little worried about going into Infinity Nikki in full Chinese (with Chinese audio, UI, and subtitles).

I surprised myself and found playing Infinity Nikki in Chinese wasn’t as difficult as I had expected. The lore-specific terminologies, such as the words used for monsters, different species and places, took a little while to learn, but once I learnt those, the storyline was straightforward and generally easy to follow. The difficulty increased as the storyline progressed, and things took a slightly darker turn.

It’s not the easiest game to play in Chinese, but out of the major free open-world games such as Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail and Wuthering Waves, Infinity Nikki 《无限暖暖》 is the easiest in comparison.

Besides the dialogues in the main storyline and sidequest, the other game elements, such as item descriptions, are much simpler when compared with character gacha games. Each piece of clothing has stats, but they’re simple words and numbers. There aren’t any long descriptions of specific skill attributes or effects often found in character gacha games.

The stylist battles and item upgrades aren’t crucial until much later, so it’s easy to take this game slowly and learn the different elements when required. I practically ignored most of the materials and upgrades for the first three weeks. I focused on the storyline, exploration, and dressing up my character. A friend didn’t know there was an outfit upgrade system until 4 weeks into playing the game!

Should you play Infinity Nikki in Chinese?

The main story dialogues in Infinity Nikki are fully voice-acted, and along with the subtitles, it’s a brilliantly immersive experience. Honestly, I would love to recommend that every Chinese language learner play Infinity Nikki fully in Chinese, but unfortunately, that’s not viable.

There’s no way to recap the storyline directly in the game, so if you care about the storyline, high comprehension is recommended. Of course, you can look up words in the dictionary, but it won’t be an easy task. How much could you take before you become frustrated with the number of unknown words and phrases?

If you are comfortable reading fantasy novels and have some experience with playing games with Chinese interface, then playing Infinity Nikki in Chinese should be a breeze.

You can set the audio language separately from the subtitles and UI language, so I recommend that all Chinese learners play with Chinese audio at the very least. Get in some listening practice while playing a game you enjoy!

Compilation videos of the story scenes on Bilibili and the Infinity Nikki Chinese social media page on Weibo are materials you can use to learn while keeping it Infinity Nikki related. It’s a great alternative if you’re not able to play Infinity Nikki in Chinese.