The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood Review: Your Choices Have Consequences in this Evocative Cosmic Tale

Welcome to my The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood review. We were not given a review code for this title.

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a choices matter narrative-driven visual novel with light design and time management elements. Play as Fortuna, a witch who has been banished for 1000 years by her coven leader after foretelling the coven’s doom. Desperate for company and freedom, Fortuna summons a Behemoth and makes a forbidden pact with the demon. Her new dark companion teaches her how to craft her own tarot deck, with which she can see into the past, present, and future of her friends’ lives and help them make decisions that will alter the course of their fates.

But when Fortuna becomes tempted by a power greater than fortune telling, can she resist the call to twist fate to her whims?

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is, largely, a pick-your-path narrative tale that challenges the player with one key question: If you lost everything, what kind of choices would you make to reclaim what’s yours?

As Fortuna, players will spend the game mostly confined to a small dwelling atop an asteroid, forever floating in the endless vacuum of space. Deprived of her tarot deck, magic, and friends, Fortuna summons the Behemoth called Abramar to regain some of what she’s lost. He offers her power—but it comes at a terrible price. The player will be able to set the terms of the contract: What do you want? Power? Knowledge? How do you want people to feel about you? Fearful? Adoring? What drives you forward? Friendship? Self-discovery? And—finally—what are you willing to sacrifice in return.

Without any story or characters (as of yet) to base their decisions on, players can make these choices as carefully or callously as they like. After all, what’s the harm in sacrificing the coven that betrayed you or the one you love most when you don’t know who they are yet? In this way, the game sets you up to take emotional risks that you might not lean into otherwise. And, as the story unfolds, the consequences of these choices unfold, as well.

The Behemoth Abramar will also bequeath you with the ability to craft your own tarot deck. Well, not tarot…something new. Somethings uniquely yours. Divorced from the “human” limitations of tarot, your new deck will be much more powerful, he promises. And with that, the player is introduced to the next component of gameplay: designing the cards of their fortune telling deck.

By spending elemental energies given to you by Abramar, other witches, or gleaned from readings, you will be able to “purchase” backdrops, characters, and decorative accoutrement to design each card face. Depending on the elements used, the card will come to have many meanings: Guidance, discovery, justice, predestination, luck…and so on. Given that each card is so dynamic, with meanings-a-plenty, each draw will reveal a series of options you can pick from.

Does the witch at the end of your reading succeed in their task at hand? Or is failure in sight? You make the call and, thus, direct the narrative through these choices.

The story expands when an arbiture named Thea—from a neutral law enforcement sect of witches—visits Fortuna to reevaluate the terms of her exile. A thousand years seems pretty excessive, after all. And who knows what may come of a miserable, vengeful witch with a millennium to scheme. She will also ask you for a fortune reading, as will pretty much everyone who visits.

As an example of the duality of fortune-telling, here are the options I was presented with after drawing one of my homemade cards for Thea:

“You’ll make a very important arrest. It’ll be someone from my coven.”
“You are going to play a crucial role in future politics within the Witch community.”

Depending on the reading you go with, later parts of the story will change. Different readings will also earn you different amounts of elemental energy. Leaning into darker, more foreboding choices will net you more “fire” energies, for example. Collecting these energies will determine what artistic elements you can afford to unlock for new cards as you fill out your not-quite-tarot deck.

Depending on the choices you make, you’ll unlock additional magic abilities, like being able to learn the true nature of an item or someone’s intentions or being able to draw an additional card each reading. This will expand the number of story paths open to you so you can better shape your journey.

After the arbiture’s visit, Fortuna is allowed visitors. Other witches from all over the cosmos start to stop by for readings or, in the case of old friends, to catch up after two hundred odd years apart. Visitors will open up to you about their struggles and ask for advice—which you can give by reading their fortune and picking a divination that suites you.

Those are the basic mechanics of the game: Create, read, choose. There will also be twists and turns that I won’t spoil here, but it will open you up to being able to leverage time and resource management to manipulate what you want out of the central conflict.

As other witches reenter Fortuna’s life, the consequences of my earlier choices started to dawn on me. Although I may have sacrificed the coven for her freedom, I was now faced with spending time with friends who will be impacted by that decision. Dahlia, Jasmine, Patricia… I was having to face them, learn about them, come to love them…all while realizing it was too late, I had already sealed our fates.

Some players might not like the “choice first, meaning later” approach to storytelling here, but to me it was a unique emotional journey where it wasn’t the weight of the choice that mattered so much as it was the weight of my own realization: Oh gods, what have I done.

In this way, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood had one of the most unique and unusual emotional arcs I’ve ever encountered in a video game. Every step forward was filled with encroaching dread. Can I live with the price I must pay for my choices?

And what would I give to undo it all and make things right again?

The nagging feeling of “Did I make the right choice?” nips at your heels, drawing closer and closer with each turn of the storybook page. I started tallying up what I could stand to lose vs what was too precious to me. I started weighing my choices, watching the cosmic scale tip out of my favor, and then weighing them anew with a different personal bargain in mind. After all, I had so, so much to lose.

I tripped over my heart falling in love with Grethe, a fellow witch who made a forbidden pact with a Behemoth also and who accidentally became entangled with the dark entity.

I realized I had a sister to think about, one for whom my past choices had already had devastating consequences.

I was starting to empathize with Abramar, who had been betrayed and destroyed a thousand different ways in his long history, and wondered if I even had it in me to turn against him after all he’d offered me.

I was given impossible choices to betray or be betrayed myself. I saw friends turn to traitors turn to enemies. I had friends staying friends against all odds. I made both allies and enemies across the cosmos. I was asked to start World War III or watch another witch suffer. I had to pick between my cherished immortality or my personal freedom.

I even consumed another witch to absorb her power. Then—maybe then—I could finally save those who meant the most to me, and those who I had doomed in the first place.

When I say, “choices matter” in this game, what I really mean is choices held me underwater, kept me just below the surface until I could hardly breathe.

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood engulfs you in a climax so powerful I was sobbing long before the credits rolled. In a two part emotional rollercoaster, you will be forced to make choices, sway hearts, and save or betray the coven that forsook you. While witches are screaming in pain around you, held in limbo due to the calamity you predicted at the onset, you’ll be forced to negotiate with the very tides of fate to try and find a solution that will both save your life…and ensure you can live with yourself afterward.

Whatever you decide, it’s in your hands. And, once it’s all over, you have one more steep price to pay. Abramar will come for his payment owed, and you’ll have to decide whether you can bare to lose it.

I tried them all: sacrificing my immortality, sacrificing the one I love most, sacrificing the entirety of my coven. I won’t spoil too much, but there were poignant farewells that tugged so hard at my heart I could feel it in my stomach. There was the taste of revenge at the back of my throat, starting to stink a lot like regret.

And there were consequences so grave that I ripped the cosmos apart just to put the pieces back together.

Summary

Pros

Compelling cast of characters with gripping emotional depth
Emotionally satisfying narrative that can be completed in 6-hours or less
Music and writing that made my grizzled old creative soul stir unlike anything before
Heart-wrenching musical score that peaks and dips at the perfect story beats

Cons

If you don’t like reading/visual novels, this game will not be for you
The design elements are a bit clunky/stiff

Conclusion

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a story-driven game where you play as Fortuna, a witch exiled on an asteroid. To gain her freedom, she makes a pact with a forbidden creature, crafts her own Tarot cards, and reconnects with other witches. Through choices, players shape the fate of the witches’ society in a complex, magical universe. The game mixes card-building with narrative exploration, touching on themes like identity and community. It’s perfect for fans of rich storytelling and unique, mystical gameplay experiences. Oh, and it will savagely break and then remake your heart like it’s clay.

If I could go back in time, I’d make Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood my 2023 cozy game of the year. Heck, it might even be my overall GOTY (sorry, Baulder’s gate 3). It’s been a long time since a video game stirred my heart and soul with such vigor, and likely Telltale’s: The Walking Dead was the last to do so with this level of depth. Go buy this game, pay full price, buy it again, gift it to a friend. Cozy Game Reviews approved.

I have more recommendations for you, too, if you like witchy cozy games.

Stay cosmic cozy, gamers!