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There's a whole world of Dark Souls-style lore hidden in this series of dress-up games, and I bet you can't tell which is which

News
By Ali Jones published 28 February 2025

The deep lore of the Nikki series caught me completely off-guard

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Love Nikki character wearing Dark Souls 3 helmet
(Image credit: Papergames)
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The aesthetics of Infinity Nikki - the open-world dress-up game featuring pink-haired protagonists in a variety of elegant dresses - suggest to me a relatively lighthearted, fairytale narrative. But this week, I've learned that I might be completely wrong about that, thanks to an array of items from a previous game in the series that literally rival Dark Souls for their threatening, gothic lore implications.

Last week, a resetera thread highlighted a user-made quiz that tasked players with guessing whether a given item description came from the Dark Souls series or Infinity Nikki's 2017 predecessor, mobile game Love Nikki - Dress Up Queen. Everything I knew about the Nikki series comes from its most recent release, but I've already discussed its pink hair, elegant dresses, and Zelda-inspired open-world, so I assumed this quiz would not be all that difficult.

There are 96 questions to the quiz, but they're a simple A or B choice - each item description is from either Love Nikki or the Dark Souls trilogy. With only two options to pick, you'd think that a 50% score would be a given, but I'm here to tell you that that was simply not the case.

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Now, I'm no Dark Souls lore buff, and I'm sure that a few classic items would be easy wins for long-term fans. But there's a good number of Nikki descriptions that are entirely at odds with my expectations of that series, and clash nicely with my actual expectations of Dark Souls. As a general rule, I found that anything that mentioned flames or ash was a FromSoft entry, but the words 'Dark' and 'Souls' were, somehow, no guarantee of the Chosen Undead's involvement in proceedings.

Eventually, having been bamboozled and hoodwinked by the mobile dress-up game many, many more times than I'd care to admit, I struggled to a final score of 56%. Given the balance of probabilities here, that's far closer to the statistically likely 50% than I would have liked - in fact, I was only six wrong answers away from that 50/50 ratio. It's an embarrassing final score, but I'll attempt to excuse myself by claiming that I simply wasn't prepared for how dark the Nikki games are. This cutesy dress-up game, it appears, is anything but cutesy.

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Ali Jones
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I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for news, shaping the news strategy across the team. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.

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