Review: The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood
Witches? Check. Behemoths? Check. Magical card readings powerful enough to foretell the destruction of Witchkind forever? You guessed it, check! Containing all of the above and more, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a beautiful narrative filled to the brim with deliciously diverse characters, gorgeous graphics, and a story that makes you want to play it over and over again, just to see how one new decision might alter everything.
Story: A
Developed by Deconstructeam and published by Devolver Digital, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood excels most in its story. You play as Fortuna, a Witch who has been exiled from her coven for 1000 years due to a worrying Tarot card reading she gives. 200 years into her isolation, she summons and creates a pact with a forbidden creature - a Behemoth - who helps her to construct a new, dangerously powerful Tarot deck that has the power to disrupt reality itself. But nothing comes for free in deals with Daemons, and Fortuna must learn how to use her new fortune-telling powers effectively as the weight of her upcoming payment looms ever closer.
It is clear from the very beginning that in this game, every decision you make truly matters. Whether you’re constructing new Tarot cards to add to your deck, or determining which dialogue option to choose when interacting with old friends or new connections, one small change can have a huge effect on the later story. Decisions you make as you read the futures of others will come into play in ways you might never suspect, and everything - and everyone - is interconnected in manners that will likely surprise you.
Gameplay Mechanics: B
For the majority of the game, your gameplay alternates routinely between a few options: creating Tarot cards, receiving visitors, and reading said visitors’ fortunes to determine various elements of their fate. You also have the options to, as Fortuna, sit on your bed and either study, read, or sleep. Each of these options (aside from sleeping) works to add a bit more context to your place in the world. You might read from a textbook that provides background information on how the magic system that fuels your Tarot cards works, or have a conversation with an Arbiter (essentially a police Witch) that helps to catch you up on news you’ve missed in your 200 years of solitude.
My biggest frustration with the gameplay is the irregular pacing. Though relatively short overall, the game takes a couple of hours to truly pick up speed. Even when I was nearing the end of the narrative and theoretically had more actions to choose from, there were moments where no actions were available to me aside from sleeping, studying, or reading - none of which held any appeal because they really didn’t improve my character or provide enough enjoyment to engage in. I ended up choosing the ‘sleep’ option multiple times just to progress the story, even though it added nothing positive to my experience.
Aside from the pacing issues, there was nothing that stood out negatively about the gameplay features. Indeed, the conversations I held with the various characters who continued to visit my home were always entertaining, and the act of creating Tarot cards to build my desk was a pleasant enough task - I enjoyed piecing together different templates to come up with cards that pleased me to look at. Still, I wish the actions offered to me were a bit more involved, to step the gameplay experience up to something spectacular rather than something just fine.
Vibes: B
Here’s the thing: The vibes in this game are good. The music, created by video game musician ‘fingerspit’, is enchanting from beginning to end. The art style is perfectly Witchy and captures the essence of the game so well. When I think of these individual components it’s hard for me to find flaws, but when I think of the vibes put together…something is missing. It’s as if a piece of the game’s soul got lost in the process, and that little piece is keeping me from considering this adventure to be what I so badly want it to be: a masterpiece.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t give The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood a shot. I firmly believe that this game has a lot of love to offer its players, especially anyone struggling to determine who they are and what they are meant to accomplish in life. The game offers a pretty extensive content warning list for ideas discussed in the narrative that might be triggering for some players, such a self-harm, gender dysphoria, and depression. These issues aren’t the central focus of the story, but instead are factors that various characters, Fortuna included, have had to deal with in their own lives and/or are still figuring out how to best handle.
The way the game doesn’t shy away from these concerns - issues that so many people in the real world are dealing with - but instead embraces them as parts of the human (and Witch) experience is telling of how Deconstructeam wanted The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood to be a game that its players could see themselves reflected in. We may not have magic powers or spend our time flying around the cosmos, but we do long for others to validate our true selves. We do experience depression, and we do struggle with taking care of ourselves in healthy ways. In addition, there is so much love in this story, from familial to romantic to a deep love for humanity itself. In this way, even though I think this game is missing a piece of its soul, the pieces that it does contain are more than enough to carry any player through an emotional journey that, I believe, you will come out of on the other side better.
Overall Rating: B
A magical experience that’s especially perfect for the fall season, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood will remind you just how important human connection can be, and how even the smallest choices we make can have lasting consequences.
