A game is not finished until someone plays it. No matter how perfect it is, no matter how spectacular its mechanics are or how interesting the decisions we have to make are, if no one plays it, it is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. The very act of playing the game is what concludes the game. Without players there is no game. Because the act of playing is an act of creation in itself. Because the player is part of the act of creating the game.
It is important to talk about creation in order to talk about The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood because it is an important theme in its narrative, but also in how it is played. One of the basic mechanics of the game is to create tarot cards to throw at people who come to visit us and, with them, to know what the future holds for them. But before getting into that, it is important to get to know the studio behind the game.
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a game created by Deconstructeam, a studio from Valencia that was founded in 2012. In 2014 they published Gods Will Be Watching, a game that became famous for its cruelty both in terms of difficulty and in terms of the difficult decisions it forced us to assume. In 2018 they would publish The Red Strings Club, a cyberpunk adventure game of gentler difficulty, excellent narrative and absolutely glorious music and art. In between, they published small games for free that they put together in a compilation called Essays on Empathy, where they tackled mechanics and ideas that they would later develop, or not, in their commercial games.
This small presentation is important because it is important to understand that The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood has the DNA of Deconstructeam. It is experimental not in the sense that it is strange, or complex, but in the sense that it plays with the limits of language. Mechanical and narrative. And it does so for the purpose of exploring things it could not explore in the same way otherwise.
In The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood we play a witch who has been exiled for a thousand years to an asteroid for having predicted the end of her coven. After two hundred years, she decides to summon a Titan, a creature born before time itself, to free herself from her chains. Thanks to him, she discovers that she doesn’t need a tarot deck to predict the future: she can create her own cards to do so. And instead of receiving vague answers, which he must interpret with grace, he will receive very concrete answers that will change the future of anyone whose cards he reads.
This serves as an excuse to explore a rich, deep and peculiar universe. One where only women can ascend and become witches, and is used to explore gender issues, but also how power relations are shaped, or the implications of immortality. All this while introducing us to planets, communities, species and entities that resist being categorized in fantasy or science fiction.
Of course, there is a story behind all this. But that story is also shaped by the things we decide. Whether our protagonist feels depressed, pissed off or feels nothing in particular; whether she wants to destroy her coven, save it or have nothing to do with it; and whether she wants to flee the asteroid or has accepted her fate, despite everything, is in our hand. The premise of the game is that we have been banished to an asteroid and it is unfair, but the story leads to us deciding, along with the game, which story we are playing. How our protagonist feels and what the consequences of what happens to her will be.
In fact, now we go back to the beginning, that’s where the letters come in. We don’t just read them, we create them. By combining different elements, we can create our own designs. But each element has different concepts associated with it. In that way, each card is not only artistically unique, but also has different readings depending on what we make of them.
That’s why we make the game in The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood. There are certain events that always occur and are inevitable, but the story, how it ends, how the characters behave, and how the plot unfolds, is always in our hand. Our decisions, how we choose to declare that the protagonist feels, and the readings we make of the cards, shape the world. The story. They make us the writers of the game itself as we play it. Making explicit our role in it as that oracle who has condemned his coven from the very moment we have decided to play the game.
That’s why The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is brilliant. It’s different, it’s vibrant, it’s fun and it’s smart. No other game is so explicit and so subtle in literally putting us in the shoes of its protagonist. In making us live the role of a character without telling us that we are role-playing it. That’s why it would be a shame if a game as brilliant as this one went unnoticed. Because it’s not every day that we see games as exceptional as The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood.
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