During Steam Next Fest, when demos for hundreds of new and upcoming games are available to download, I rarely play any demo from start to finish — typically, I’ll select about 10 based on descriptions, trailers, or keywords or tags and spend just enough time with each to form a tentative opinion. The games that don’t pique my interest are promptly uninstalled, while the ones that seem promising are added to my wishlist so I’m reminded to revisit them on their release dates. This routine, though it has served me well in the past, completely disintegrated after I installed the demo for The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, a game developed by Deconstructeam and published by Devolver Digital.
I was captivated almost immediately, and after one playthrough became three, I looked up from my laptop screen with bleary eyes and realized that it was well past midnight. The other demos would have to wait; The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood had simply been too enchanting to resist.
The first factor that compelled me, a serial demo sampler, to repeatedly devour a one-hour slice of The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood was its intriguing storyline, which feels a bit like Circe set in outer space. You play as Fortuna, a witch who has been sentenced to a 1,000-year exile for predicting the demise of her coven and sharing this information with her fellow members. After spending 200 years drifting through the cosmos on her asteroid-bound home, Fortuna decides to summon a Behemoth (an immensely powerful, demon-like entity) and enter a forbidden contract with him in hopes of regaining her freedom.
One can hardly blame her — to be confined to a small area while constantly bearing witness to the immensity of the universe is probably a disorienting experience, she hasn’t had a conversation in two centuries, and she can’t even exercise her fortune-telling skills since her deck of tarot cards was confiscated by her coven upon her banishment. It’s easy to sympathize with Fortuna’s plight, but there’s also something undeniably cozy and tranquil about her pixel-art dwelling and its starry backdrop — for the player, at least, it’s a perfectly pleasant place to spend the game.
Unlike Fortuna, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood’s narrative is not confined to that house-sized asteroid. Toward the end of the demo, we’re treated to a glimpse of the distant past, when Fortuna is a (mostly) regular person taking a road trip with her sister and a friend. The rawness of this trio’s conversations is initially jarring — they openly discuss sexuality, politics, and other topics that are relatively rare to see in video game dialogue — but their candor quickly began to feel refreshing, and I learned a great deal about who Fortuna is as a person from these interactions.
Another aspect of the game’s demo that intrigued me was the role that tarot (or something akin to it) plays in molding and revealing the narrative. Ábramar, the Behemoth summoned by Fortuna, is a surprisingly pleasant conversationalist, and I found myself listening raptly as he reviews each source of magical energy — air, water, earth, and fire — and teaches Fortuna how to craft a new deck of divination cards. The player is tasked with choosing backgrounds (“spheres”), main figures / focal points (“arcana”), and various decorations (“symbols”) for every card, with each component costing a set amount of energy from one or more of the four elemental categories. I became invested in this process and the sense of creative license it affords, agonizing over the selection, sizing, and layout of every element.
The cards’ names and meanings are determined by the combination of elements you opt to use — for example, merging the “Shipwreck Library,” “Wolf Mother and Children,” and “Bottomless Jug” yielded a card called “Coming of Age” — and at several points in the story, the readings Fortuna conducts with her new deck establish how the dialogue proceeds. Depending on which cards are drawn, the player is presented with multiple choices for how to interpret the fortune being read. There appears to be at least a moderate amount of variation — some cards yield the same results for a given question, but others present an almost entirely different set of options — so I’m excited to see to what extent card mechanics impact the general course of The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood’s plot.
Overall, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is shaping up to be a game with a charming, potentially profound story, an ingenious approach to narrative development, and ample opportunity for players to personalize their experience. I’m certain that, when the full game is available, it’ll be the only thing I play for days.
The demo of The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is currently featured in Steam Next Fest, and the full game is set to be released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2023.
