I have gazed upon the cards, and what do I see? Huh, two of wands, four of cups, and that one with lots of swords from the meme about buying too many swords. What could it mean? I was expecting to draw The Fool or Justice and almost certainly Death, what do I do with four cups? Shots, I guess. Apparently, the cards are trying to tell me this: The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood will be out on August 16.
It's the new game from Deconstructeam, the Spanish indie studio responsible for cyberpunk bartending/hacking/pottery game The Red Strings Club and miserable-situation simulator Gods Will Be Watching. You play Fortuna, a witch who is exiled from her coven for centuries and banned from using tarot, which is why you have to covertly design a new deck of fortune-telling cards with the help of a charming/terrifying supernatural being. We tried the demo during Steam Next Fest, and had a lot of fun with the system that lets you place, resize, and manipulate elements to make your personal cards, and also the narrative side where you deal with other witches and strange magical beings.
One of several twists in The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is that it's properly cosmic. You haven't just been exiled, you've been exiled to space, living in a cute little two-level cottage on an asteroid. While not as explicitly sci-fi as The Red Strings Club, it feels like Deconstructeam aren't done with "exploring the future" yet. What better way to explore the future than with divination?
I recently spoke to Jordi de Paco, creative director on The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, and asked about the space hut Fortuna lives in and what role it plays in the full game. "You are going to be able to unlock more interactive objects in your home," he said. "One of them is a library of interactive fiction that Fortuna has in there. We collaborated with other writers to have, like, itch.io interactive fictions included as an optional minigame. Since Fortuna has been isolated for so long, she survived reading interactive fiction as an escapism method, and there are some other systems that you will unlock on the house."
The idea of having text adventures to play inside another game sounds pretty neat, but Jordi did emphasize this, and the other minigames, were a small part of the overall thing. "Mostly it's a game about talking to witches and reading their fortunes and dealing with cosmic shenanigans," he said, and that certainly sounds like enough to be getting on with. You'll be able to read the full interview with Deconstructeam soon, and you can wishlist The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood on Steam and GOG now.
