Deconstructeam, the indie game developer behind The Red Strings Club, has revealed their latest project: a tarot-inspired narrative adventure game called The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood. Their new game follows the story of a fortune teller named Fortuna, who was exiled for predicting the destruction of her coven. After summoning a behemoth named Ábramar, Fortuna learns how to create her own deck of fortune-telling cards in order to help improve her fortunes.
Player-Designed Fortune-Telling Cards
Unlike traditional tarot cards, the fortune-telling cards in The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood are completely customizable. Players use a basic image editor to layer pixel art depicting a vast universe of cosmic magic and science fiction, constructing a card from a background, an arcane figure, and symbols. Each piece incurs varying costs to Fortuna’s elemental resources of fire, water, air, and earth. These resources are generated through drawing cards in another of the game’s mechanics: divination.
Player-Controlled Dialogue
As players interact with other characters in the game, Fortuna will draw cards at predetermined points in the narrative, divining their meaning relative to the character’s queries. Players then interpret the cards to contextualize them for other characters. The game hints at the deterministic paradox of Fortuna’s predicament and how the player’s choices can have material consequences for the direction of the narrative. The potential for player control on the direction of conversations comes through deck-building. Cards that draw from particular elemental powers have different effects, encouraging players to construct decks targeting a certain emotional or narrative direction.
A Branching Narrative
Deconstructeam promises a narrative that covers not only Fortuna’s cosmic voyage but her history and the histories of her fellow witches, with the promise of a political edge to the centuries-spanning story, portraying the clashing ideologies within covens of witches who may have values stemming from wildly different points in Earth’s history. The game’s main plot might not change much based on the player’s actions, but decisions can have a dramatic effect on the characters and storylines contained within that central narrative thread.
Release Date
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood will release on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2023. Until then, players can anticipate getting lost in the beautifully immersive world of cosmic magic and science fiction.
