Witches in outer space plus artsy deck building? Sign me up for The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood.

if you want a concise recommendation without spoilers, here it is: go play the game, support the developers, it’s delightful.

SPOILERS AHEAD

First off, I love anything where 95% of the major characters are badass women (think Monstress by Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda (if you haven’t read, it’s so good)). Second, I love getting to flex my creative muscles in games (looking at you Passpartout). Thirdly, games that help me explore my own personality and morals speak to the high schooler semi-obsessed with Meyers-Briggs and personality tests in me (not as obsessed as one of my friends, but that’s another story).

I played through twice, once as an “all the choices I would really make” and once to get a utopian ending. In my first playthrough, I ended up as an old lady on dome city Earth, playing tabletop games with the local biddies. Fortuna wasn’t pleased with that ending so it looped around to another playthrough. To be honest, I chose all the unique options for the coven leadership except Fortuna being the only to eat Aedana. I was on team “spread Aedana to the cosmos” all the way. I hate it when games make me choose something against my own judgement to get the “perfect” ending.

Case in point, in Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life, the “good” outcome of a scenario with Rock’s son is to slap the son, it makes him happy. WHAT. EXCUSE ME. How dare you make me choose between my son’s happiness and his wellbeing.

Anyway.

My second playthrough ended with the ‘mortal’ utopia where you get to sit on a couch chillaxing with a dog. Seems legit. Probably my favorite deviations from my first playthrough are the Grethe romance, which was super cute, and my interactions with Wunn and Junreisha. Love that Junreisha is just like “yes, girl, take over the whole universe, you have my vote” and double love reading the cards for Wunn and getting “you are super impressed by me even though I couldn’t understand a word you said.” The second one in particular tickled me pink considering how unpleasant I found Wunn’s ultimatum in my first playthrough.

Also, not going to lie, I started the fake ending in my first playthrough and force quit because I thought the game was really going to give me a “it was all a dream” ending.

Second playthrough I went through it and gave away waay too much information. And I have words to say to the sensorial witch for that.

My biggest complaint is there wasn’t an Abramar romance option. For someone with so many eyes, he was pretty hunky. Some of the utopia endings leave that a little open-ended, I suppose, but there it is: open-ended. Second small gripe – what the heck happened to Grethe for the utopia endings?

Did not realize these developers (deconstruteam) are behind Red Strings Club until the place/background (I forget the in-universe title) unlocked. RSC has been on my radar for years but I never got around to playing it. Literally downloading it right now (the banner image is a little scary, haha) which is a high honor since my laptop has a teeny tiny amount of memory and I burned through ten GBs already this week downloading Glaze and Nightshade.

Have an idea for my next playthrough? Send me an email at solar.gardens@protonmail.com!