I’ve never been the type to trust a deck of cards with anything important, and stories built around tarot symbolism usually lose me within the first spread. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood changed that calculus almost immediately, mostly because it never asks players to actually believe in tarot as prediction. It asks them to build the cards themselves first, then live with what those cards end up meaning.
Fortuna gets exiled to a tiny house on an asteroid for the crime of predicting her coven’s downfall, a thousand year sentence she spends the first two centuries serving in total isolation. Summoning Ábramar changes that. He’s an ancient, forbidden Behemoth, older than the universe itself, and the pact she strikes with him gives her a path back toward some control over her own fate. Political intrigue among the wider Cosmic Witch society complicates that reconnection further, since not every witch who shows up at Fortuna’s door is there purely out of friendship. What follows isn’t a rescue story so much as a slow, deliberate reconstruction of a life, told through the witches who start showing up once word gets out that she’s broken her silence.
The deck building at the center of the game does real narrative work rather than existing as a systems layer bolted onto a story. Fortuna crafts individual cards from combinations of five elements, earth, water, air, fire, and void, choosing arcana and accents that shape what each card actually means. Those cards then become the literal language she uses to counsel visiting witches through readings. Every card built expands the vocabulary available for those conversations, since the same card can carry a different meaning depending on the context of who’s asking and what they need to hear. Disposing of a card that isn’t working returns its elements to the pool, so building the right deck for a given reading becomes its own small puzzle rather than a one way commitment. That puzzle element keeps the crafting side from ever feeling purely decorative, since a beautifully built card that says the wrong thing to the wrong witch can actually backfire on a reading.
Deconstructeam, the three person Spanish studio behind this, already had more than a decade of experience building narrative heavy games before this one, most visibly through The Red Strings Club, a cyberpunk bartending and adventure hybrid Devolver Digital also published back in 2018. Devolver brought The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood to Steam and Switch on August 16, 2023, priced at $17.99, and a single playthrough runs somewhere between six and ten hours depending on how much time gets spent building cards and reading for visitors. That prior collaboration between studio and composer gives the whole project a cohesion smaller teams don’t always manage across a full length narrative game.
Fortuna’s two closest friends, fiery, strong willed Dahlia and pre-Industrial Revolution English transplant Jasmine, anchor most of the main story, but the wider cast fills in around them with real texture. Yu’enia, Fortuna’s own mentor, Grethe, a fellow criminal who summoned a Behemoth of her own, and Patrice, Fortuna’s sister, each only appear a handful of times, yet each one leaves a real mark on the world Deconstructeam builds around them. Yu’enia in particular reads as someone whose lessons Fortuna is still unpacking decades later, mentor figures who shaped her long before the exile ever started.
What makes the writing land as consistently as it does is how efficiently it establishes character. Even minor visitors feel fully realized within minutes of meeting them, individual voices and stakes clear almost immediately. I found the game’s handling of its heavier themes, isolation, self harm, gender transition explored through a post human lens free of the societal pressure that usually frames those stories, thoughtful rather than exploitative, difficult material treated with real care instead of being used for shock value. That care extends to how the game treats Fortuna’s own past too, chapters that shift between her present situation regaining freedom and flashbacks to her life as a mortal before she Ascended into witchhood.
Dahlia gave me some pause though. She’s a Daemon hunter, boisterous and bold, and I liked her plenty as a character, but her design, an ample chested woman quick to reach for violence, leans on stereotypes associated with Black women in a way the game’s other, more varied witch designs mostly avoid. It didn’t sink my overall read on the character work, but it’s worth knowing about going in. That tension sits alongside a much smaller, lighter one. Ábramar himself isn’t a romance option, a detail plenty of players clearly wanted otherwise, though it’s a minor gap next to the Dahlia question.
The game carries real content warnings worth knowing before starting, self harm, suicide, discrimination, gender dysphoria, depression, anxiety, nudity, sexual content, and drug use all surface somewhere across the story. Outside of readings, Fortuna can nap to pass time, study arcana to unlock new card options, or work through her own interactive story sequences, small activities that keep the asteroid house from feeling like a waiting room between conversations with visitors.
Replaying the game reveals just how much actually shifts underneath a familiar structure. I predicted the same coven member would get arrested across two separate runs, and each time it was a different character entirely, since the readings Fortuna gives don’t lock every outcome to a single fixed answer. That structure means the fate of something as large as planet Earth itself isn’t fixed either, shifting between runs depending on choices made much earlier in the story. Some plot points hold steady no matter what, but enough of the story bends around Fortuna’s own choices that a second playthrough actually surprises rather than just repeating the same beats with cosmetic differences. Questions about determinism versus free will run underneath all of that mechanical variance. Fortuna spends the whole game wrestling with how much of what she predicts actually comes true because she said it would. It’s never fully clear how much was always going to happen anyway.
Presentation carries the whole experience beautifully. Hand crafted pixel art gives every witch a distinct visual identity, reinforcing the game’s clear thesis that there’s no single correct way to be a witch. Every witch design carries its own silhouette and color palette distinct enough that I never lost track of who was who even across a cast this large. The asteroid home itself, Fortuna’s small house floating alone in space, gets rendered with the same care as the crowded flashback scenes set on Earth, and the animated pixel art sequence that opens the game after the tutorial sets a tone the rest of the presentation holds onto throughout.
Composer fingerspit built the score across almost five years of intermittent work, more than three hours of music spread over a 38 track album that leans on strings, piano, and lo-fi textures. Individual tracks carry character names as titles, The Gardener, The Daggersmith, The Historian, tying specific musical themes to specific witches rather than reusing one generic motif across the whole cast. Some tracks lean fully instrumental and ambient, built to sit under quiet reading scenes without pulling focus, while others carry enough melodic weight to work as standalone listening outside the game entirely. Fingerspit has worked with Deconstructeam before too, scoring The Red Strings Club, and that returning collaboration shows in how tightly the music integrates with the writing rather than sitting underneath it as background texture. That score elevates nearly every scene it touches, and I came away from more than one reading with the music doing as much emotional work as the dialogue itself.
Verdict
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood succeeds at something rare, making its central gameplay mechanic and its emotional storytelling feel like the same thing rather than two systems running in parallel, using tarot deck building as the literal language through which Fortuna reconnects with a world that exiled her. Its cast of witches, drawn with real individuality and treated with real care even in its heaviest material, gives a compact runtime remarkable emotional density, and fingerspit’s score elevates nearly every scene it touches. Dahlia’s design gave me real pause, and the story’s final stretch softens compared to everything that comes before it, but neither issue undercuts what’s otherwise a singular fusion of mechanics and meaning, one I’d point almost anyone toward regardless of how they usually feel about tarot. For a three person team, the scope of what actually made it into the finished game is worth sitting with on its own.
