I am putting the final touches on my ninth tarot card: a pair of potted plants framing an old gentleman as he sits on a pier over purple water, with a red sky behind him. Once completed, its name is shown to me. This is The Memory. I am told it represents mercy, wellness, authority, yearning, passion and temptation. It joins the rest of my cards in my own personal tarot deck.
As much as I would want to spend all day tucked away in my basement/bedroom making tarot cards, I am needed elsewhere – another witch requires my services. The falcon delivered letter tells me her name is Grethe, a witch architect. A mutual friend asked me to meet with her and I want to help.
The moment I see her, I am head over heels for her. She wears a beautiful gray suit, light blue undershirt and dark blue tie. Half of her face is made up of a stunning wispy shadow and a pair of yellow eyes, one on top of each other. In the world of magic and Cosmic Witches, her appearance stands out for one reason: she fused herself with a behemoth. Behemoths are ancient, powerful, eldritch beings and seeking them out, let alone fusing with them, is strictly forbidden in our coven.
Grethe knows she has crossed a line, and I know this feeling well because so have I. Though Grethe isn’t a new witch, I haven’t met her until now because of my own exile. I have been in exile for the past 200 years, which is not even a quarter of my millennium long sentence for foretelling the eventual end of my coven.
I am deeply interested in Grethe. Not only is she charming and handsome, but I want to know more about behemoths. I will go on to reveal my own situation to Grethe and help her out of her predicament, and a relationship will eventually kindle.
Later, when my estranged sister pressures me into seeking the leadership of the coven who once betrayed me, Grethe will be by my side. She will help me navigate the political landscape as I learn the tragic secrets of my magic. And when my time comes to pay for the bargain I’ve made with my own behemoth, to have my magic taken away and banished to a normal life, she will never visit me again. At losing my love, my life, my power and my immortality I will come to regret this price I have agreed to pay in exchange for freedom. I will curse Abramar, the behemoth whose power allowed this to happen. He will appear, taunting me, and offering me the chance to do this all over again, to make new choices, and I will take that chance.
This is the Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, and it is, without a doubt, my game of the year for 2023.
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood (for PC and the Nintendo Switch) is the latest game by – probably my favorite game studio – Deconstructeam, who are the devs behind Red Strings Club, Del Tres Al Cuarto and several other wonderful games. They are an independent game studio out of Spain, but I won’t hold that against them (dear reader, I am Mexican, and this is a joke), and have most of their games published by Devolver Digital, and Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is no exception.
The game is marketed as a “narrative experience” and I guess that’s not wrong, but it’s so much more. It consists of what you would call visual novel segments with mini games in between, but just describing it as that is such a disservice to not only the experience of playing the game, but the feeling you get inhabiting this world.
You play as Fortuna, a tarot reading witch with the gift of prophecy, and much like Cassandra, this gift ends up being more like a curse when she predicts the end of her coven of Cosmic Witches. Now, Cosmic Witches are not your ordinary sage and crystal witches. They are real deal immortal and powerful beings that live away from humanity in space. The leader of Fortuna’s coven exiled her for a millennium and took away her tarot for predicting the end of the coven.
This is where the player assumes control over Fortuna, as she makes a deal with Abramar to escape exile. The details and consequences of that deal are up to the player – the first important choice you have is how this story will end. Abramar teaches Fortuna how to reach out into the cosmic wheel and use its energies to create a brand new tarot.
This is our main minigame: creating and designing our tarot cards. Combining this with the main gameplay loop of doing readings to other witches, using their energy from the readings to create new cards is incredibly fun and satisfying. If the game had been just that loop of readings and crafting, I would have been satisfied. This felt like how my Animal Crossing loving friends talked about the loop of that game that I could never get into.
Going back to Grethe, when I first met her, she wanted a reading from my new deck to help her with her behemoth problems. I shuffle it up while I tell her to keep her questions in mind. Firstly, she wants to know what to do with her behemoth problem, and secondly, she has a personal quest she has dedicated her witch life to: she wants to use architecture to find the meaning of life, of existence.
The first card that comes up is Varuna. It depicts a sea snake wrapping itself arounda statue in the ocean while a colony of fish swim past. It represents passion and power, among other things. I take this card, and while I am allowed to use it to answer either question Grethe has, I like using cards to the order of questions asked – that feels authentic to the tarot experience.
I am given three choices in how to interpret this card. I can tell her to appreciate the behemoth fused with her, because when it leaves, she will miss it. I could also tell her to conquer the behemoth, to stop being afraid and make the behemoth be the scared one. Both of these choices don’t quite feel right to what I know of Grethe, so I go for the third: accept the behemoth, don’t fight it, embrace and fuse with it. I tell her that the way to stop being split is to become one.
As the game and story progress, we have the opportunity to make A LOT of choices and play a few more minigames. The choices dictate who our allies are as the coven becomes more and more divided until we are presented with the option of pushing a lot of our friends to the sidelines and leading the coven ourselves. This is a choice, one you aren’t forced to make, even if your sister pushes you quite hard in that direction.
From there, the rest of the game is getting to know and interact with a quite large group of characters. One story in particular, that of a young trans witch in denial of her own self as she gains these powers, was really fucking good. I knew something like this would happen, or atleast premused so when I saw Ty Galiz-Rowe from Uppercut post on twitter that “this one is for the trans girlies.” I trust Ty when it comes to games and knowing what the trans girlies want, as a trans girlie myself. So I am not lying when I say his tweet was the main reason I seeked out this game, and like usual they were fucking right.
I am in my cozy living room and in front of me is a new witch, freshly ascended. She herself is still having trouble believing she is a witch, and more importantly, that she is a woman. She is trans, but before ascending, she did not even allow herself to consider the possibility. She is sitting across my tea table where I do my reading, wearing a dysphoria hoodie and a beard, a sight that I, Fabby, find way too familiar to my past. I try to help her embrace her new status as a witch and learn more about herself. She is an engineer, she likes spicy food and western movies. She tells me cooking was her only creative passion, but she found herself too depressed most days to cook, and that too resonates with me. I want to make her happy, I want to give her a good life, I want to help her love and accept herself. We finish the ritual and then it happens. Gone are the hoodie and beard. replaced with loud red eyeshadow and a very cute criss cross top.
I struggle to come up with negative criticisms of this game. I have seen people online complain that they were not interested in the game’s change of focus to the internal politics of a witch coven, but man, I loved that shit. Yes, the card crafting and tarot reading are where the game shines, but getting to make those choices of who to support, of how to shape the future of the coven, especially knowing what your future will look like, was so painfully delicious.
I loved every second of this game, it touched me in a deep and powerful way. I think about restarting/continuing my adventures in it every day – but I haven’t. Part of me fears that going back, trying to see all there is to see in this game will make my original choices, my story, suffer.
It’s the end of the game, the credits have passed. My Fortuna is now mortal, old and alone. She is bitter, her white hair shaking as she paces her home located inside a domed city on Earth, a thing I predicted would happen many years before. She receives a message telling her that maybe she should draw one more card. And I do. I draw Forgotten Campsis, which depicts an earth elemental in a conveyor belt about to be grabbed by a rock construct. Among other things, it represents rightfulness, success, communication, peace. I am given two options on how to interpret this card. I can either embrace my fate, I have made my choices, I have gotten my ending. Or I can say, no, this is bullshit, and after I go to sleep, time will restart and I shall find myself at the beginning of my story.
I like to think that my Fortuna restarted herself at the beginning of the game, and instead of summoning a behemoth, she looked around the room at her next 800 years of exile and said, hey, what’s 800 years to an immortal witch?
Indie Hell Zone 