Deconstructeam, the Spanish micro-studio responsible for the inconclusive but entertaining Gods Will Be Watching and the beloved cult hit The Red Strings Club, has returned to the hit genre cosmic wheel sisterhoodA game full of mysticism and Wiccan fantasy lore, as brighton pop-up shop as vortex of Nag Champa.
And, let’s be clear, it’s great. The demo we had access to covered the prologue and was essentially a tutorial that introduced us to some of the characters and core game mechanics alongside the dialogue system. Essentially, you’re a fortune teller expelled from your commune of witches by a corrupt leader for being too good at your job and predicting the group’s downfall. Sentenced to 1,000 years of imprisonment on a comet, you summoned an ancient spirit/behemoth/many-armed scorpion after two centuries of isolation because, frankly, you were boring. Understandably so.
So, there’s a lot to say. Anyone familiar with games like The Red Strings Club or Coffee Talk will find this familiar. Through dialogue and speech checks, you can tease out information about the wider world and win the favor of certain characters through charm or intimidation. You can also, presumably, upset people, but I don’t when I’m playing because I’m too much of a person to mutiny. But the tl;dr is, this is a choice and consequence visual novel about love, magic, fate, and reality, and the writing is snappy enough to keep your eyes peeled as you go through all the text dialogue (no voiceover, and frankly, Which is for the best, because everything it does in a game like this breaks the flow).
The main operational difference between this game and many of its contemporaries is that instead of mixing drinks, you devise tarot cards. These are the methods of your fortune telling. Here are some simple RPG mechanics that determine the type of fate of the various characters you’ll meet. You have a lot of freedom when designing your deck: multiple choice questions dictate your choices, and the design elements you choose (background images, characters, foreground objects, and symbols) determine how the cards are interpreted in dialogue— Simply put, when drawn in a tarot reading, whether it spells good or bad consequences. Where you place a card’s visual elements also seems to affect its stats. There seems to be a rather complex system under the hood driving this, and smart players will surely be able to figure it out. I’m an idiot, so my experience with it has been pure, messy experimentation, always approving a card’s final design with “I guess this will work!”
The fate that your character Fortuna (laughs) ultimately predicts is actually manipulated by you, so, in a sense, there’s a meta-game here where you, the player, become sort of the narrative director. During most conversations with new characters, there will be an opportunity to predict their fate. The cards in your deck will be shuffled and one will be chosen at random, and applied to the problem at hand. An alchemical combination of card statistics will determine the multiple-choice answers available to you, ranging from pleasant to painful, depending on what you want to reveal.
For some characters, reassuring them that things will turn out well may be the key to securing their loyalty. Only a flood of bad news will prompt others to take action on your behalf. Deciding how to steer the narrative to the best possible outcome, whatever you think it might be, is where the game “lives”. I suspect the replay value of The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood will be enormous.
This type of highly relationship-focused game has huge crossover appeal with RPG fanatics. It’s awesome that a small studio can use the visual novel format to tell huge, compelling stories that AAA seems to have decided to abandon in favor of endless live service crap. It’s quickly becoming one of my favorite genres, and I’m really surprised by that, but I think in the end what they do is make the writers write their socks off: they have to, because the game with the least amount of action leaves the text empty. Where to hide. Their life and death depend entirely on the quality of the script.
So it’s a game where the best writing comes out in the medium. For similar reasons, some of the best art direction and sound design. It’s hard to conjure up an entire fantasy world of ancient gods, secret societies, and hidden witchcraft lore using tools as crude as those available to a small development studio in Valencia, but the Sisters of the Cosmic Wheel manage to conjure up some very tantalizing People stuff we spent a short time. You can almost feel the massive weight of this behemoth as it hovers around your cosmic abode and knocks on your windows. You can feel the hurt of unjust exile. You can smell patchouli.
Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is coming to PC and Switch this year. By the way, it plays really well on Steam Deck.
