I love visual novels. I also love all things witchy and people often ask if I am a witch when I’m out in public. So you could say that I was just a bit excited to tackle a combo of the two.
So The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is effectively a visual novel with some very light gameplay elements to it. If you’re familiar with the game series Coffee Talk – it’s pretty much that, but with witches and the coffee making elements replaced with tarot making. Your gameplay is limited to customizing these cards and moving around your small home, jumping between different stations to either make cards, delete them, study, sleep, or talk with visitors to progress the story. The core loop basically revolves around chatting with visitors, occasionally making a new card, and sleeping to the next day when nothing is available. It’s straightforward, but effective.
The card customization itself is mostly just aesthetic, but has some strategy to it in that what you select as templates will ultimately determine the card’s meaning. That said, I never really felt like I was challenged to do so because the meanings are rather broad and I pretty much got the results I wanted each time when doing the actual readings anyways. It’s a neat mechanic, but lacks the depth to be anything other than a fun little distraction from the meat of the game: its story.
The story starts off simple enough. You get to learn about cosmic witchcraft, this coven that you’re a part of, and why you’ve been exiled to this asteroid for hundreds of years. It does a great job laying this foundation – introducing new characters at a relatively steady rate to keep the experience engaging while also avoiding info dumps.
These characters introduce various subplots to the game, which ultimately end up changing minor details about the story. A seemingly meaningless decision might slightly change future dialogue lines, which I thought was neat even if it wasn’t some major story-altering change. And the characters themselves were fairly interesting. They each have their own little backstory and although some are more fleshed out than others, I can’t say I outright disliked any of them. Some made me laugh, some made me interested in learning more, and some outright made me question my ethics.
Several themes are tackled throughout the story. You’ll dip heavily into philosophy, but also relationships and even witchy politics. None of these topics are so deep as to lose the casual player, but they are each intriguing enough that some parts did leave me thinking and I can’t deny I like games that make me do so.
There’s also a romance element, but I can’t say I really understand it. Like, one of the characters I had talked with just showed up and confessed and I suddenly ended up on this romance route that progressed to the point of sleeping together within just a dozen lines and was way too forced to feel genuine. I can’t say I mind the addition of romance, but it was not well executed here.
As for the overall pacing, it’s relatively slow to start, but picks up steadily as you play and leads to a very engaging story climax that I couldn’t step away from. The studio did a great job balancing the little character building moments with the progress of the overall story, much more so than many other bigger-budget visual novels I have played.
Similar praise can be said about the pixel art style. It’s like, really good. The character designs are top-notch, the animation looks great, and there is a ton of detail packed in there. The studio obviously spent their time here and I was very impressed with the result. Same with the music. I knew as soon as I heard that title theme that this would be a soundtrack that would stay with me and the rest of the music did not disappoint. It’s super somber for the most part, but fits the whole “isolated in space” theme and I really enjoyed that vibe.
On the performance front, there’s not much to say. The game runs at a locked 60 fps, which was a bit disappointing, but at least has no issues staying there. Game settings are limited to audio sliders, text speed, cursor speed, language, and screen mode. Nothing too complex and unfortunately lacking in some basic VN features I would deem necessary, like auto and skip options. Otherwise, the game runs and controls well – no issues there.
That said, I did run into a major soft lock that unfortunately required input from the devs to fix. The hotfix provided did indeed solve the problem and I imagine that it will be patched in time, if not before release, but I feel the need to mention it regardless as there may be others that I did not run into that will end up in the final release.
And for how long the experience takes to clear – it took me just over five hours to clear one playthrough. Of course, this entirely depends on your reading speed and could easily be double my time. It’s not a long game by any means and the story wraps itself up nicely in that time, but I can see this maybe being an issue for those accustomed to longer visual novels.
I will say that I was not a fan of the replayability though. I got my ending and then went back to change my last few decisions to see if that would change the outcome, but found that the game auto saves at the credits and I could not do so. This is not helped by the fact that the only form of saving is auto-saving – you cannot manually save. So there’s no ability to experiment with different outcomes and this makes any sort of completionist play style really difficult as you’ll have to replay the entire game several times over to see everything it has to offer. Can’t say I’ll be giving this one a replay for this reason even if there are different endings to explore.
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood does a great job tackling some heavy topics in its short run time, with some solid pacing, fun characters, and a top-tier art style to top it all off. It does lack in some areas – particularly with its romance elements and how it handles replayability – but I had a good time reading through it and would recommend it to visual novel fans, especially those inclined to the more witchy stuff.
Quote: The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood does a great job tackling some heavy topics in its short run time, with some solid pacing, fun characters, and a top-tier art style to top it all off.
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood retails for $18 USD on Steam. It is also available on GOG and Switch.
I was provided a review copy of the game in order to write this review. Read more about how I do my game reviews here.
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