The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood Review (Ascilla)
After 12 hours of game play, I have to admit that I cannot in good heart recommend this game. I really thought I would love this game since I love occult-like games, tarot, space, and anything with witchy-aesthetics. The fact I was able to make really cool tarot cards out of different sceneries and arcana was already a win for me. The characters looked interesting, the art style is super charming, and the story at the beginning was very catching. If that is enough for you, I would say this game is good for one play through. But this game fell short with so many misses.
The story itself is disappointing..."Shape the fate of the cosmic Witch society" makes it seem like your decisions matter, right? Well, I would go look for something else such as Oxenfree (if you have not played this game, you totally should!). As a good majority of these negative reviews states, the choices you make seem to matter until you find out mid-game that they don't. Some do, but they are minor choices that don't really affect the story. Also mid-game there was a huuuge shift in tone. It goes from light and fun, to something that felt rushed and heated between the MC's friends which didn't seem to fit their characters.
Throughout the whole game there was so much salaciousness...don't get me wrong I'm no prude and enjoy sexual interactions and exploring sexual desires between characters in books/games (and fully aware the correlation between sexuality and witches), but with almost every character bringing the subject up its so disorienting and completely takes me out of the game. It was funny at the beginning, but came up in conversations with characters where it felt totally out of place.
The character movement speed is atrociously slow and didn't even realize that you can spam-click to get her to go faster until I was doing a second run to try and get 100% in achievements and seeing how different the ending was.
THE REPLAYABILITY IS NOT GOOD....for a couple of reasons: new game plus-like function & skipping text. Nothing is really new about the dialogue when you play a second (or third if you really want) playthrough unless you make different choices (minor conversations do change), so why not skip? Nope, you have to spam-click to get through dialogue. Secondly, it would have been amazing to be able to reuse the card designed you did in a previous playthrough. I mean why not, the main premise of the game was to create your tarot cards and you spend a good amount of time actually making them look nice. I found myself in my
second play through, not being interested in the attempt and rushing to select my arcana and scenery.
Thank you for reading my rant! Have a lovely day.