Deconstructeam, the independent studio known for titles like The Red Strings Club, Gods Will Be Watching, or the extraordinary The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, has announced a new collaboration with Selkie Harbor, bringing to life Many Nights a Whisper. This short game is designed to be completed in a single session and allows players to take on the role of the Dreamer, a figure chosen to perform a sacred ritual. A game about a ritual for which we will only have one chance. The ritual consists of launching a fireball using a sacred sling towards a chalice described as “impossibly distant.” The […]
Deconstructeam, the independent studio known for titles like The Red Strings Club, Gods Will Be Watching, or the extraordinary The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, has announced a new collaboration with Selkie Harbor, bringing to life Many Nights a Whisper. This short game is designed to be completed in a single session and allows players to take on the role of the Dreamer, a figure chosen to perform a sacred ritual.
A game about a ritual for which we will only have one chance
The ritual consists of throwing a fireball using a sacred sling towards a chalice described as “impossibly distant.” Success in this attempt is crucial, as the community hopes that their wishes will come true. However, the pressure is intense: if the player fails, a calamity will be unleashed that will affect the villagers for ten years, adding a significant level of consequence and responsibility to the game.
The gameplay focuses on preparing for the ritual event. Throughout the day, the Dreamer trains by throwing fireballs and interacts with their mentor. During the night, they have the opportunity to visit the Confession Wall, where they listen to the whispered wishes of the community and decide whether to fulfill them or not. This focus on ethical dilemmas and emotional conversations is characteristic of Deconstructeam, and it is expected to resonate with fans of their previous work.
The world of indie video games is vast, but critics have sifted through to determine the best ones, and we bring you a list of them for you to enjoy.
It is undeniable that during 2023 an obscene amount of great games have been released. That’s why it has been impossible to keep up with everything. Even more so if we talk about such a complex space to navigate as the indie scene. That’s why we made this list. To tell you which are the best indies of the year, in our opinion, and the reasons why you shouldn’t miss them.
Indonesia is far away from us, but A Space for the Unbound does the impossible: it makes us feel like we have lived there in a rural area in the late 90s. With fabulous art, beautiful music, and a story that touches delicate themes with immeasurable grace, A Space for the Unbound is one of the games that has gone unnoticed the most and deserves all its accolades. A small masterpiece that proves that gems are made in every part of the world. Not only in Europe, the US, and Japan.
Cocoon
Jeppe Carlsen, designer of two authentic wonders like Limbo and Inside, decided to take his time to make his magnum opus. And it has been worth it. Cocoon is a delicate, intelligent and extremely polished work. Its puzzles may seem simple at first glance, but they hide multiple layers and extreme delicacy behind them. And like the other great puzzle games of this year, a narrative much deeper than it seems.
From Tetsuya Mizuguchi, creator of Rez and Tetris Effect, we expect nothing less than excellence. That’s why we weren’t surprised when Humanity offered us exactly that. Putting ourselves in the skin of a shiba-inu, we must guide humanity through its destiny, giving them directions on the ground so they know where to go. Easy to understand, not so easy to complete, and very difficult to fully conclude, it is a prodigy of puzzle design and, although it may not seem like it from the outside, one of the most heartfelt games of 2023.
Mediterranean Inferno
Visual novels have an unjustified bad reputation. Mediterranea Inferno proves it with an adventure about millennial anxiety, the consequences of confinement and the pandemic, and what it means to grow older in a society obsessed with youth. All with excessive imagery, heavily inspired by Dario Argento’s giallo, and LGBTQ+ culture. Do you need to be a millennial or gay to enjoy this game? No. Because even those who are not, will find something true resonating in the heart of Mediterranea Inferno.
Pizza Tower
Intense, complex, and for a very specific audience, Pizza Tower is the spiritual successor to Wario Land that we were all waiting for. As if a cartoon character were having an anxiety attack and decided to avoid it at all costs, everything in Pizza Tower is aggressive and hilarious. And at the same time, it is perfectly designed. An example of prodigious design and how a great game can be made that simply isn’t for everyone.
Although platform games are still being made, a certain type of games in this genre were only made for a very short period of time. For example, Super Mario 64-style games were only made for a few years. That’s why it’s amazing to see a game like Pseudoregalia, which rescues that kind of design and takes it to a level where we break it with combinations of insane jumps. A prodigy that no lover of the early 3D platformers should miss.
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood
The latest game from the Spanish developers Deconstructeam is probably their best game to date. Playing as an exiled witch on an asteroid, we will have to predict the future of other witches using tarot cards that we design ourselves. All of this leads to a stunning story, accompanied by amazing art, writing, and music, which speaks to both the game and the player.
Void Stranger
What starts as a simple game of pushing boxes to reach the stairs and keep going down, soon becomes something more. The puzzles become stranger, the narrative becomes obscure, and everything we took for granted becomes complicated. Throw away all the expectations you had before playing Void Stranger. Do you like puzzle games? Then play this game without knowing anything else. You won’t regret it.
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a game that puts us in the shoes of a witch forced to write her own story… and her own downfall.
A game is not finished until someone plays it. No matter how perfect it is, no matter how spectacular its mechanics are or how interesting the decisions we have to make are, if no one plays it, it is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. The very act of playing the game is what concludes the game. Without players there is no game. Because the act of playing is an act of creation in itself. Because the player is part of the act of creating the game.
It is important to talk about creation in order to talk about The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood because it is an important theme in its narrative, but also in how it is played. One of the basic mechanics of the game is to create tarot cards to throw at people who come to visit us and, with them, to know what the future holds for them. But before getting into that, it is important to get to know the studio behind the game.
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a game created by Deconstructeam, a studio from Valencia that was founded in 2012. In 2014 they published Gods Will Be Watching, a game that became famous for its cruelty both in terms of difficulty and in terms of the difficult decisions it forced us to assume. In 2018 they would publish The Red Strings Club, a cyberpunk adventure game of gentler difficulty, excellent narrative and absolutely glorious music and art. In between, they published small games for free that they put together in a compilation called Essays on Empathy, where they tackled mechanics and ideas that they would later develop, or not, in their commercial games.
This small presentation is important because it is important to understand that The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood has the DNA of Deconstructeam. It is experimental not in the sense that it is strange, or complex, but in the sense that it plays with the limits of language. Mechanical and narrative. And it does so for the purpose of exploring things it could not explore in the same way otherwise.
In The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood we play a witch who has been exiled for a thousand years to an asteroid for having predicted the end of her coven. After two hundred years, she decides to summon a Titan, a creature born before time itself, to free herself from her chains. Thanks to him, she discovers that she doesn’t need a tarot deck to predict the future: she can create her own cards to do so. And instead of receiving vague answers, which he must interpret with grace, he will receive very concrete answers that will change the future of anyone whose cards he reads.
This serves as an excuse to explore a rich, deep and peculiar universe. One where only women can ascend and become witches, and is used to explore gender issues, but also how power relations are shaped, or the implications of immortality. All this while introducing us to planets, communities, species and entities that resist being categorized in fantasy or science fiction.
Of course, there is a story behind all this. But that story is also shaped by the things we decide. Whether our protagonist feels depressed, pissed off or feels nothing in particular; whether she wants to destroy her coven, save it or have nothing to do with it; and whether she wants to flee the asteroid or has accepted her fate, despite everything, is in our hand. The premise of the game is that we have been banished to an asteroid and it is unfair, but the story leads to us deciding, along with the game, which story we are playing. How our protagonist feels and what the consequences of what happens to her will be.
In fact, now we go back to the beginning, that’s where the letters come in. We don’t just read them, we create them. By combining different elements, we can create our own designs. But each element has different concepts associated with it. In that way, each card is not only artistically unique, but also has different readings depending on what we make of them.
That’s why we make the game in The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood. There are certain events that always occur and are inevitable, but the story, how it ends, how the characters behave, and how the plot unfolds, is always in our hand. Our decisions, how we choose to declare that the protagonist feels, and the readings we make of the cards, shape the world. The story. They make us the writers of the game itself as we play it. Making explicit our role in it as that oracle who has condemned his coven from the very moment we have decided to play the game.
That’s why The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is brilliant. It’s different, it’s vibrant, it’s fun and it’s smart. No other game is so explicit and so subtle in literally putting us in the shoes of its protagonist. In making us live the role of a character without telling us that we are role-playing it. That’s why it would be a shame if a game as brilliant as this one went unnoticed. Because it’s not every day that we see games as exceptional as The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood.
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