6. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, dev. Deconstructeam
You ever just make a giant mess of everything? That's what I did in this game. Total disaster of a run.
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is probably the most obscure game on this list, coincidentally/not coincidentally the gayest game on this list. You are a witch, Fortuna, exiled for hundreds of years in an isolated space house. You summon a Behemoth, a great primordial demon of unspeakable chaotic power... but for what exactly? For revenge? To escape? Just because you're lonely and got nothing better to do? If you want to, you can get very horny with your new demon friend. Ultimately, all these choices are up in the air, since The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood lets you define not just the choices your fortune teller makes, but also the motives behind them. The story ends up remarkably flexible to your whims and desires. It only really becomes a problem when you start writing yourself into plot holes.
Gameplay-wise, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a "hang out" game, much like VA-11-HaLL-A, even down to the pixel art and dialog choices. Some of the people you meet are your cute witch friends, some of them are monstrous inhuman tree creatures, some are already dead. You give them a fortune telling and the plot progresses. Probably the highlight of the game is when Fortuna meets a young witch, recently awakened both as a magical being and as a trans woman. She was reborn into outer power and beauty. It is when this fantasy of unlimited queer power in the cosmos hits its fullest, like Heaven Will be Mine but with less horny and with deities replacing giant robots.
Really the most interactive element is an art minigame where you design your cards. You can have multiarmed bartenders wielding swords in space. Or tentacle dragons under the sea. (Cosmic Wheel also lets you use this same art engine to make a pizza in one of the best scenes.) Somehow these random Metal album covers you've created allow you to decide whether your best friend is diddling a magic-less human or not, and how they feel about it. It is a fun little side activity, there's a whole economy of the four classical elements.
Some of the writing around the magical lore is just spectacular, gaming writing is rarely this good in any game: "Air is the collective unconscious, energy within a community, the ecosystem. Air is everything that surrounds us. Air is... Context." It is a mystical system that offers a philosophical view of the world, even if ultimately it is just a way to draw a headless suit of armor covered in eyes that lets you make up silly things. I do not think I lived up to any of the mysticism as Fortuna. Yet it was inspiring to see the game try for something bigger, some sincere spiritualism.
You have basically full power as an author thanks to Fortuna's talent for deciding fortunes. You grab a series of cards and are given a multiple choice that can either decide the future or the past. You can just casually doom our Earth to being conquered by AIs in a random joke, then that will come back to haunt you in later story threads. You can promise to feed your entire coven to your Behemoth, and he will demand payment for that choice eventually. That is going to be a problem if you actually do come to like some of the other coven members. This authorial power is immense, but is extremely dangerous. You can even terrify the Behemoth with certain calls.
In my case, I ended up with four contradictory threads running into each other all at once. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood gives you practically infinite power, so plot holes be damned, you can just give people a utopian ending. However, it was unsatisfying. It did not feel like I told a real story. I had to launch the game back up again and start from the beginning, just out of pride as a writer. I cannot pull a good ending out of my ass and be happy with that. Sometimes you cannot live with your mistakes. Sometimes you need to let all the good witches burn for the good of the narrative.
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