Infinity Nikki - It's easy but is it cozy?

 Infinity Nikki launched recently and it's already in v1.1 and it's second short event. It's lauded as a "cozy game", and it's certainly an easy one despite really unintuitive combat targeting. But does it count as cozy?

Disclaimer: I do not consider myself to have "whaled" in the game. I started at launch, when they were very generous with redemption codes. I bought the first premium battle pass but have not spent anything since. I nevertheless managed to get 24/24 in every wound of Mira Crown: Wishfield Pinnacle, the rotating "fashion" challenge.

What do you actually do in the game?

I probably played a lot more per day than most players are able to. If you can only play a couple of hours a day, you will barely be able to make progress on the main story quest over the course of a week unless you just fast forward past the dialog (and at that point, why are you even playing this game?). Things you "should" do on a daily and ongoing basis (according to various guide websites such as this one) include:

• Complete the Daily Wishes
• Checkmark Spend Vital Energy
• Checkmark Claim Monthly Gifts and Weekly Gains
• Checkmark Claim Event Rewards
• Checkmark Collect Overworld Resources, especially once-a-day rare resources and your bling limit of 160,000
• Checkmark Defeat Esselings for Materials

At a high level, it actually quite closely copies the model of successful single player gachas like Genshin Impact and right away, those games are not really "cozy. All of the activities listed above are relevant to acquiring resources and having enough resources to do things but some take a lot of time -- especially advancing skills (collecting skill "insights") and advancing quests. How many hours a day do you have to play?

It's also important to look at what the "daily activities" guides DON'T tell you to do:

• Keep moving forward in the main quest to unlock various skills and regions
• Complete sidequests
• Find collectibles such as Whimstars, Dews of Inspiration, and Chests
• Play minigames, use Photo mode, mix-and-match outfits

These are the actual core of the game, but how are you supposed to fit these in after your hours of chores? If you want to stop and do things which are technically not so important for advancing through the game, such as taking photos or spending resources on making clothing from sketches, that could be deprioritized until you make a lot of progress in the Main Story Quest.

There is pressure to play hard right away because nothing is going to wait for you. The next fashion banner or time-limited event is coming soon and you need those diamonds and resources from various activities if you're not going to spend spend spend.

Could you theoretically ignore everything and do just what you like? Sure, but in the long run you will miss out a lot of key resources (like Diamonds and core resources to make and upgrade outfits) and either have to make it up with cash or just accept you're left behind. It's a proven winning formula for encouraging pay-for-convenience. The overall resource scarcity is certainly meant to monopolize your time or make you open your wallet when you're suddenly short on resources. But this is not cozy at all.

A much more "cozy" live service game is Palia. There's really no rush, even with time-limited events, as they are committed to "no Fear of Missing Out" mechanics for a truly cozy experience. But probably they aren't making the same amount of money hand-over-fist selling cosmetics either.

Gacha

Theoretically you (probably) don't need to spend on the banners or even pull a full outfit from the free diamonds they give you since the main story quest challenges can be completed at a minimum level (to keep progressing the main story) with outfits you can get in-game. It can help especially with Mira Crown recurring challenges, but it's not that vital.

So while players might complain about the cost of buying all the shiny outfits, this is closer to a choice to buy non-essential luxuries. The game still functions in a cozy (or not) way independently of this, so I do not discount Infinity Nikki as a cozy game simply because it's also a gacha game.

Where there can be a tricky situation is if you would have to spend an inordinate amount of resources (or it is outright impossible) to complete Mira Crown unless you happen to have an outfit that satisfies a strict criteria (e.g., a particular Style and Label combination that must both be present on multiple pieces).

In the most recent Mira Crown Wishfield Pinnacle, there was one such requirement and what you can find in-game might not have given enough pieces to use (assuming you found them in-game and could craft them). But "fortunately" there was a full 4-star outfit with the required Style+Label combination in the Permanent Banner. It remains to be seen whether this will continue to be the trend.

Mira Crown

Mira Crown is the Infinity Nikki's endgame for now, and as they unlock more skill nodes, it gets more challenging. What a styling challenge in Infinity Nikki amounts to is getting qualifying scores with qualifying pieces. Part of it can feel random: Do you have qualifying pieces for the maximum score?

Mira Crown isn't strictly necessary and with conservative resource management I've managed to get the full score in the last three. But probably others won't be so lucky, especially if they spent all their consumable resources (Energy Crystals for Vital Energy) early trying to do "fun" things in the game such as actually crafting outfits from sketches.

So here is the first challenge to whether Infinity Nikki is "cozy": If you have to manage your resources in order to pass the recurring events, and in doing so deny yourself the freedom to actually do what appears to be core to the game -- making outfits -- is this counter to the "cozy" experience?

Players will say that a gacha game is of course pay-to-win. But is opening your wallet repeatedly still part of the cozy experience, or just a cozy game for people with cozy amounts of money?

Crafting Outfits

It seems like a big part of the game is collecting outfits and in the main story you do have to craft a full outfit. Along the way you will probably have to craft various other outfits, and all this requires Materials, Money (Bling), and Upgrade Materials (Bubbles) to actually make the outfit useful for the various styling challenges you need to pass to keep progressing the Main Story Quest.

A big problem here is you have only limited resources (Vital Energy) to get some of it done.

• Many outfits require a lot of materials you can only get by spending Vital Energy.
• Other Materials you can try to farm (e.g., Bling) but there's a sharp limit each day, beyond which you will have to spend Vital Energy to exchange for more.
• To even qualify to get certain Materials (Essences) you need to advance your skills and the skill milestones are staggering compared to how much skill you can earn each day:
• For most skills you can progress by 100 units per day but the milestones are in the thousands.
• With the latest v1.1 expansion that unlocks the remaining nodes in the skill tree, you will need 18,000 skill to be able to get all the types of Essences in just one skill (and along the way spend hundreds of thousands of Bling to unlock the nodes).
• If you happened to spend all your Vital Energy Consumables (Energy Crystals) which you sometimes get from levelling or the battle pass, then you are looking at literally months -- or spending money to buy Diamonds and catch up.

As I mentioned I was careful with my Energy Crystals and other resources so when the v1.1 update dropped, I was ready to spend and unlock a lot of useful nodes including skill nodes that gave boosts to styling challenges. Even so I barely squeaked by getting a Perfect score in the final round of Wishfield Pinnacle, and since launch I have not crafted any outfits (that required Vital Energy) that I didn't have to, even though there were certainly a lot I wanted to craft.

If you spent a lot of your Vital Energy and Energy Crystals crafting various outfits you liked (and isn't that a big part of the game?) then you probably couldn't do the same. Now comes the temptation to actually spend money to progress. Otherwise, how are you going to unlock skill nodes at a reasonable pace while actually doing other things such as crafting outfits for fashion fun? Is this the "cozy game" experience?

Resource Limit and Daily Chores

Spending months on a cozy game isn't so bad except the structure here is more like daily chores. If you don't maximize your daily skill and farming limits, you will just rely more and more on Vital Energy, which you need for a lot of other things.

It might not sound like your daily chores for collecting skill points and bling amounts to a lot of work, but it can if you actually want to do them usefully: Such as collecting the rare once-a-day resources, and earning as much Bling as you can so you don't have to exchange Vital Energy for something as mundane as Bling.

For example, the limit on how much bling you can earn each day is 160,000 and each unit of bling is 100 units, so you need 1,600 spread over collecting bling and defeating Esselings. I'm not sure what the limit on Threads of Purity are but it's a lot of Esselings to kill and I've only reached it once. It's definitely the one I don't even try to maximize.

You need tens of thousands of thread and literally multiple millions of Bling. That is not an exaggeration. Getting these with Vital Energy just means you don't have Vital Energy for resources that can typically only be gotten with Vital Energy, such as Bouldy components for clothing and Bubbles for gear improvement (small one-time sources like quests not being counted).

Also, various resources are on a 24-hour timer from the time you collect them, so likely they are all spread out during the day meaning multiple logins. You could just collect whatever trash comes your way but you will end up short on key rare resources later if you ignore them now and you'll just have to catch up later anyway (but fortunately they are in the cash shop!).

We can compare Infinity Nikki to another single-player live-service cozy game, Disney Dreamlight Valley. The core game is very relaxed: You can progress as quickly or slowly as you like. Updates don't demand you do them right away. You can play as much or as little each day with no limit on how much resource you can acquire. Want to farm all day and level up all your companions to max? Go ahead! Want to take your time? That's fine too. You don't even have to check in every day to use up your "Vital Energy" or lose it to overflow.

So in comparison with Infinity Nikki, I feel Disney Dreamlight Valley is a much "cozier" game for this main reason:

With a cozy game, you can play on your own schedule.

If I play less today, how much do I feel I've missed out or fallen behind? Can I do what I want instead of having to play very efficiently because resources are limited? Can I play more to do more or am I limited each day -- and therefore have to show up every day? 

FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is not cozy.

As an adult with a life, I don't want a game that controls my time and makes me play around the game's schedule. That's not cozy, that's controlling. Maybe if I could just spend one or two focussed hours per day at a time of my choosing it might not be so bad, but that's not been my experience.

Falling behind can mean being locked out of events

Let's suppose you don't care about Mira Crown and you don't even care about progressing at a steady pace through the main story and you just do what you feel like. OK. There's still one big drawback to this, and it is evidenced from the various other gacha games that came before: Events will be based on your progress.

We're in early days yet, so the events don't require too much progress in the main story, but you will eventually need to keep moving forward in order to participate. Some games like Genshin Impact or Honkai Star Rail are quite aggressive in this way, with time-limited events structured around the current endgame locations, which is a pretty daunting path for anyone newer to the game to reach. I suppose it remains to be seen just how much Infinity Nikki will follow this model despite labelling itself a cozy take-your-time game.

"Easy" is important to being cozy but is not the only thing

Infinity Nikki is almost stupidly easy. For example, of the big ways they challenge players is platforming games and you typically have five minutes to complete the route. During that time you can repeatedly fall and even "die" and have to respawn at the start once or twice, but you will still have time to complete it. For example, the current "Shooting Star Season" normal-mode platforming games give you five minutes when you can complete some in under a minute.

So it's an easy game, but Infinity Nikki has also carefully throttled your resources so you are constantly in a state of severe scarcity mentality, designed to nudge you into spending more and more. And to me, that's just not cozy.

How can Infinity Nikki be more cozy?

• Reduce the sense of "chores" that need to be done or you will fall behind.
• Replace the free but time-consuming stuff from chores with better exchange rates from spending Vital Energy.
• Zero skill development from using skills; no Threads of Purity from fighting monsters; and sharply limit the amount of Bling you can collect each day (currently it is 160,000, it could be reduced to around 50,000).
• In total, players can save a lot of Vital Energy by exchanging hours of tedious chores, approximately 24 hours worth of Vital Energy:
• Total of 700 Skill Insights (70 Vital Energy)
• 160,000 Bling (160 Vital Energy)
• Probably around 500 Threads of Purity, but it's more feasible to get around 200 (40-100 Vital Energy)
• You normally get 1 Vital Energy per 5 minutes so if you don't do these daily chores, you are missing out on A LOT.
• Even when I was doing all this every single day, I still felt like I didn't have enough material or Vital Energy to spare for sketches that weren't strictly needed for anything but that I just liked.
• The primary/only way to get skill and materials becomes exchanging Vital Energy in the Realm of Nourishment and Realm of Escalation. This sounds really weird as it seems to put more pressure on the players' resources now that they can't get "free stuff" but
• We can improve the exchange rate so less Vital Energy gets you more skill than you currently do. The total value in Vital Energy is around 24 hour's worth, so we can instead double the amount gained when exchanging Vital Energy for materials or skill.
• Spending Vital Energy this was is fast and convenient. If you can't do much on a particular day, you can at least spend your Vital Energy quickly in materials and skill exchanges.
• It is certainly better than boring chores. Players will still collect materials, especially rare materials with very limited amounts per day, but it won't be boring like vacuuming up every common Buttoncone or Stellar Fruit just to meet their daily Collection Insight limit.
• Other uses of Vital Energy can also have an improved exchange rate of Vital Energy, e.g., 10 Bouldy rocks instead of 5 per 40 Energy spent on Realm of the Dark.
• Change the timer of rare materials from 24 hours to 20 hours. This way, players can steadily adjust the respawn time to the time window they can play. UPDATE: In v1.2 they will reset daily at the same time.
• If you leave it at strictly 24 hours from the time you harvest, it will steadily get pushed back, especially if there is a disruptive event such as server maintenance.
• Players can have useful concentrated time to focus on collecting rare materials and get that done, then focus on other things because they can tour the map and do it consecutively..
• Limit Event prerequisites to what new players can reasonably attain in a few days. If you set it to something mid-game in the main story quest, it's a long haul and new players or those who have been trying to take things at a "cozy pace" will suddenly feel rushed.

Anything that loosens the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) grip on the player's time will likely translate directly to a sharp loss in revenue, so don't expect any changes at all.