First, you created your world.

What should a game be? I've never been inside the room when a studio decides to make something new. It's not hard to imagine what it's like to have all the potential in the world in front of you, just waiting to be molded, but rarely is that the most accurate picture of what the creation of anything new on a significant scale looks like. Why would most developers bother asking what a game should be? What it is is set in stone from before they even began: It is a product, first and foremost. This doesn't preclude it being art, even great art—the two categories are not mutually exclusive, even if they are in tension with one another.

But when I sit down and play The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, it feels like everything about it was designed downstream of that one vital question of what a game should even be. I feel this way with Pentiment, with Heaven's Vault, with Strange Horticulture, Book of Hours, and Suzerain: It feels like I am standing on the edge of a new world, even while they are inescapably familiar and old in many ways. But so it is for anything new. Nothing springs out of the aether. These games and their designers recognize that what they are is written in their very essence—not merely their code, any more than our DNA is our essence exactly—and that we are the ones who write what that essence can be.

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood stuns with its structure. It loosely aligns itself into chapters and acts, following a linear path, but one that is hard to distinguish from the little splits in every direction flattened under the feet of those who were once lost here. That is to say: I had no idea where the game was taking me, but I was eager to follow and see what I could along the way. You build a deck that is not quite tarot. You read the cards for those you meet. You change the rhythm of fate. This is the main connective tissue of the game, but the game doesn't so much revolve around mechanics as it does around the ideas of fate and meaning. Halfway through the mechanical focus of the game completely pivots and you find yourself mired in a political race.

This prospect thrilled me. So often a world is constructed to draw limitations on a narrative when working with something this intimate in scope. It is the jailer: You cannot leave this single location, and the Lore justifies why that is. Here, the world is constructed to shatter the limitations that we are stuck with. If we are jailed, why is that, who enforces it, and how can we interact with the world nevertheless? The existence of the jailer and the jailing society are contained within the jail itself. The smallness of this game creates something that feels so expansive that when you look back at the end, it's hard to believe it's just been a couple hours.

Much of that, to me, is created precisely by the opacity of the game and its mechanics, similarly to many of the games I listed previously. I'll say it: I'm fucking tired of the fetishization of player agency, letting you do anything and go everywhere or whatever nonsense that idea has morphed into. I don't need games to be a world that I live in for exorbitant amounts of time. I love when games have totally inscrutable mechanics and some degree of randomness and lock you out of events and force you to just reckon with whatever decisions you made. Give me severe limitations in scope and options, just make it interesting. Have a vision, for god's sake!

And yet: The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood's vision is of a world in which you truly construct your own meaning (which is a funny thing to say, given that meaning is perhaps the only pure act of creation that any of us engage in). It is all about agency. There's an idea here about playing the cards you're dealt by recognizing that you get to decide what the cards mean, despite the limitations of each card. But once you lay down the cards, the truth is decided. Fortuna writes reality.

Which is a funny tension, isn't it, the idea that agency is real and you decide what is, but then how could anyone else have agency when you simply write what is? How could even you have agency once you've read the cards? It's that delicious tension that lies at the heart of this game, time laid out flat so that the future and the past and the present are all just here at once when you shuffle your deck. I feel this tension most during the peak of the political campaign when a Cosmic Poet stops by to help you. Such a small thing and still we reach for the cards to generate the poem that we would have written even without the cards, skipping straight to the end that could not have been without all that we skipped over. They call it a paradoxical poem. It's beautiful:

First, you created your world. Waiting on the first beat of a new universe, you float, weightless, timeless, inside the potential of magic. This is what happens when you hold two mirrors together.

A piece of art is almost like a person. You see the fragmented experiential pieces of all that created them: the other. You see the thoughts lifted from your own head and reflected back at you: the self. You recognize the self inside the other and the other inside the self. I think I love this tension of agency undermining itself because ultimately, who gives a fuck? I don't care about whether I really have agency in a game. I just want it to be an almost-person, to be a mirror. I want us to bounce light back and forth between us until it fades away into reflected incoherence, fully subsumed into something new that we've created by staring into each others' abyss. I want it to create something new inside me that will fester and grow until it springs forth into something beautiful.

This is what happens when you hold two mirrors together: You create. The beginning was written in the end, and the end in the beginning. What difference is there, really, when time folds against itself upon the draw of a card?

At the end of the game, it turns out nothing you did really changes anything. It all collapses back into itself, into the fate which you wrote at the very beginning of the game. You were picking a card without realizing that is what you were doing. The strokes of reality had already been drawn from that very moment.

But in-between the strokes you found everything that matters.

NOTE: only played the demo

it's not outright bad or anything, but it's a visual novel disguised as a dress-up doll game disguised as a card game. i enjoyed a lot of the little conceptual snippets associated with the cards, but the writing is very dull, and the humour is very... online?

i also notice a juvenile attitude towards sex, too; i rolled my eyes pretty hard at the cosmic orgasm door that exploded someone into dust.

there's just not much here, and what "here" there is tends to be overbearingly cringe.

This game is something special. It's gameplay is simple all things considered, make fortune cards, read people's fortunes, and just basic management type stuff, but the world it builds and the style it has is just unmatched. Soon as I started I just couldn't put it down to the credits and I don't regret that at all. I loved learning about every single character, including the main one, and figuring out how a world of witches work. A must play in my opinion and a game I will revisit time and time again

As someone who went into this game with no expectations, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood really surprised me. Especially compared to other visual novel-ish games.

The larger weight your choices have makes the game super replayable, the deck building is fun and filled with tons of variety, I love the cast, and it tries to explore themes in ways that feel fresh. It really stands out from its contemporaries.

I wish I could say there weren’t any caveats, but there definetly are some issues. Most of them stem from the last half or quarter of the game, where the plot takes a direction that’s… unique? It’s not totally out of nowhere, but it feels way less intresting than the more chill vibes of before. The characters you meet during this part are also not nearly explored enough for how intresting they could potentially be, and I wish they got fleshed out more.

Even considering that, I still wholeheartedly recommend you play this hidden gem. One that I’ll 100% replay in the future.

i loved the aesthetic and many aspects of the story. perhaps one playthrough isnt enough to get all of it (currently only missing 4 achievements, one of them being a 22 card deck), but i wish that abramar was.... more. more involved in the story, more connected to fortuna, etc. the declarations of love at the end felt a bit unearned to me. i felt, as a player, that i barely knew him, despite wanting to know more, but the political campaign took over so much of the story. i ended up choosing to play support to dahlia, so perhaps if i chose to run myself i would've seen more of abramar, so i will have to do that next time. maybe my rating will change!

the lore and worldbuilding is grounded in a hyperreal, new age mysticism that is abstracted away from any real history and esotericism of witchcraft, tarot, etc., presenting an admittedly charming pastiche of these things instead. on the one hand, this produces a wonderful aesthetic, with the character designs being a particular standout. i vibed with it; it was fun and whimsical when not taken too seriously, and the card designer, tarot reading, and canvassing were novel and enjoyable mechanics, although they did feel somewhat underdeveloped.

however, this grounding also lends itself to some mawkish writing and convoluted explain-aways. when it came to points of commentary or emotional depth, the dialogue often became noticeably more awkward, jarring and inconsistent. a decontextualised mysticism is inevitably going to be limited on topics of gender, friendship, politics and power i suppose

Aprendiendo a ser bruja
Nuestra historia comienza con Fortuna, una bruja vidente desterrada en un asteroide por mil años por su clan. Fortuna se encuentra sola, no habla con nadie, no puede recibir visitas. Ella, sola con sus pensamientos, lleva ya 200 años y se encuentra derrotada, que ya no puede más.
Desesperada y con varios pensamientos intrusivos, decide que ya es hora de hacer algo, por ello, aunque su clan lo prohíba, decide invocar a un Behemoth. El Behemoth aparece ante ella imponente y se presenta como Abramar, el cual también lleva encarcelado en una prisión cósmica, más de 5000 años.
Abramar ayudará a nuestra bruja a redescubrirse de nuevo, a encontrar su verdadero yo y la enseñará a crear un mazo nuevo de cartas de tarot, ya que suyo se lo destruyeron. Y sobre todo la ayudará a no estar sola en ese lugar tan lejano de la sociedad.
Fortuna no tiene poderes, su clan se los arrebató antes de expulsarla, por ello Abramar hace un pacto con ella. Por medio de elecciones, nuestra bruja Fortuna, se irá forjando como bruja con los poderes de los elementos. Abramar le avisa que no es un camino fácil, que se lo tome con calma y paciencia a lo largo de las primeras 5 jornadas. Sobre todo calma y reflexión, ya que nuestras elecciones, las de Fortuna, nos acompañaran en todo el transcurso del juego y su final.
Card creator, Fortuna

El arte de diseñar cartas por medio de las energías y fuerzas cósmicas es el tronco motor de esta historia. Aunque la mecánica principal es de una novela visual en la que la historia avanza por medio de diálogos, en la que las elecciones importan, la creación de las cartas es la parte más importante del juego y a la que más horitas le he dedicado.

Abramar enseñará a Fortuna como usar los arcanos y combinarlos con diseños e imágenes que se irán desbloqueando por medio de las energías de los elementos (las piedritas que nos dan cuando echamos las cartas) Desde el momento en que Fortuna crea su primera carta, ya puede echar las cartas y hacer uso de sus artes adivinatorias. Puede parecer curioso que con una sola corta ya se pueda vislumbrar algo del destino de la persona que pregunta. Pero Fortuna lo hace.

Lo que más me ha sorprendido a la hora de crear mi mazo, es lo SUMAMENTE detallados que están los fondos, arcanos y decoraciones. Que son los tres elementos con los que jugaremos a la hora de forjar las cartas.

Aquí debo hablar y señalar que esta mecánica, pensada en un primer momento para PC y ratón, jugarlo en Switch, como ha sido mi caso, al principio era un poco locurote. Me explico, el puntero para agarrar y colocar los ítems, iba un poco a su bola, y controlarlo con las setas de los Joy-con era un poco en farragoso… cuando OH sorpresa, descubrí que este juego hace uso de la pantalla táctil de la consolita y aquí la cosa cambió mucho.

Confeccionar cada carta con el cuidado y mimo de la pantalla táctil, poder colocar los objetos donde yo quería y ampliar a mi gusto el fondo, fue una auténtica delicia. Bien es cierto que habría agradecido un pequeñito mensaje de que el juego era “táctil”, ya que muy pocos juegos, utilizan esta funcionalidad de la Nintendo Switch.
La reseña completa la encontraréis en mi patreon 👉🏻 https://www.patreon.com/posts/cosmic-wheel-ser-99438664?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link
y en mi web👉🏻https://istharvega.com/hablemos_CosmicWheel.html