BinaryMessiah The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood Review

Whether you like Tarot, believe in it, don't, or are somewhere in between, it's an interesting topic for a game. The Cosmic Wheel's main gameplay loop is focused around creating Tarot cards and using them to change the fate of those around you. You play as Fortuna, an exiled witch who is imprisoned for over 200 years (when the player steps in), and in the meantime the entire witching cosmos is being told through visitors that come to your window. You can sit these visitors down and converse with them as well as tell most their fortune. The story is incredibly detailed and diverse, and I have never played a game in my life in which the choices I made during it mattered so much. So many things I did wound up deciding so many minute twists and turns in the plot, both large and small. You can create cards by choosing the background and the art itself. Every background carries a corresponding fortune. These also cost energy. There are four colors you collect after each Tarot reading, and you spend these points on creating the cards. You can collect art and backgrounds from visitors. You can customize the art on the card by dragging and dropping pieces down, flipping, rotating, scaling, etc. It's fairly basic, but it's enough for just Tarot cards. You can create your own unique deck this way, and it truly feels unique to you. If you don't like a card, you can dispel it in your cauldron to gain the points back, and when you aren't talking to visitors or creating cards, you can study, read interactive fiction (to gain small amounts of points), or sleep until the next day. You have a main Behemoth that you summoned (which is forbidden and illegal, by the way) named Abramar, who keeps you company and is trying to help you find ways to escape. As the plot unfolds, you keep talking to people, and how you respond to them matters. Picking any answer won't do. Make sure you think about how you talk to people. You can gain friends and allies or create new enemies. The game's lore explains itself surprisingly well, with witches from all government factions visiting you. They visit you either as friends or as new witches seeking guidance, among many other motives. You eventually head toward a political race, and it's up to you to either run yourself or just support friends who are running. As each chapter unfolds, you learn more about your past, your friends' past, and the overall cycle of the witches and their entire existence. I was surprised that the game was able to convey an entire universe of magic and explain it all in a cohesive way without mass dumping codex pages on me or subjecting me to reading insane amounts of text. Talking to people naturally teaches you the lore and universe, which you gradually piece together in your mind. The storytelling and writing are phenomenal. These are some of the best storytelling and writing I've ever encountered in a video game. To truly show you an entire universe of lore from the confines of a single home isn't an effortless task. There isn't any exploration here. The entire game confines you to this single home, interspersed with sporadic cutscenes depicting your life on Earth in the past. Having said that, every decision you make, whether it's a dialogue or deciding whether to read someone's fortune, has a significant impact in the future. There were choices I made in chapter one that I regretted five chapters down the road and didn't realize it would have mattered. This is a game that requires multiple playthroughs to feel like you can truly master the choice-based system; however, I really wish there were more locales. While the dialogue is a constant stream of entertainment and you always feel like things are moving along, I wanted to see more of this world. In other worlds, the witches homes and see more of their past. The developers did a fantastic job of keeping you entertained in a single area for 10 hours. With that said, the pixel art is fantastic, the characters have a lot of personality in their outfits and designs, and when the game ended, I had real attachments to these characters. I wanted more from them, and I didn't forget about them by the next day. The Cosmic Wheel is a special type of game that can balance excellent storytelling, keep it well paced, and confine the players to a single playfield while making every choice matter. Games like this don't come around often. Give this game a try if you enjoy story-based games.