Recent reviews by Antigraph

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood: my honest, rushed and very immediate 2 AM thoughts, after finishing the game:

Wow. Just... wow

Few times have small indie games manage to mix brilliant writing, genuinely fun and entertaining gameplay, intriguing world lore, ill-fated revelations and sombre themes quite like this.

Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood draws from a lot of its contemporaries, while avoiding the all-too-common pit trap of feeling like a messy regurgitated mix of tropes or "just that other game again but worse", that I feel is getting all-too common in the increasingly saturated indie game market.

Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood isn't by any metric a long game, clocking in at about 7 hours for the regular story, and barely surpassing the 10th hour if you decide to 100% it, but what it manages to do with those 7-10 hours is staggering.

The gameplay, I feel, is separated into 3 parts; the deck building, the card designing and the Visual Novel. Because Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is, for all its incredibly emotionally impactful writing and fun characters, a deck building game.

A little secret about me, I hate deck builders, I generally find them unfun and tedious, but Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood... doesn't. Maybe it's the amount of control the player has over the cards, maybe it's the very untraditional way the card game works, maybe the characters just kept me interested enough to barely put the game down, but in any case, it felt truly magical.

Now. About those last two chapters.

Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a game in 7 parts. Parts 1-5 are as I've described above; fun, engaging VN gameplay with a card designer and some cool other stuff. Part 6... without spoiling, I'll just say that it's... interesting. Essentially, the game turns into a political game, not far from a game like Democracy IV, which is... an interesting change. It's not that the rest of what was there before goes away, but rather that another layer is added atop it.

Chapter 7 is just so much fun, until the consequences of your actions hit you harder than the anagnorisis hit Orestes in Aeschylus's Orestia. Which brings me to my main plus of the game, that people seem to really disagree with me on, those people are wrong, I will duel anyone to the death on this;

YOUR CHOICES MATTER. JESUS CHRIST YOUR CHOICES MATTER.

Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood follows Fortuna, a Tarot reader that just don't miss. If you predict something happens in the first 15 minutes of playing, you bet it'll come back up in 4 hours. Second conversation I had in the game came true in the *last* half-hour, it felt surreal. I mentioned something in a flashback, and it came back up in the epilogue, example after example after example of just... wow writing. That goes for the cards, too. How you design and use them has massive implications for the plot at large.

Also, I have to give a kind regard to the myth, folklore and general handling of such diverse cultural frameworks. My God. I *aspire* to be able to achieve a *fraction* of what Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood manages to pull off so convincingly and expertly, while also handling sensitive cultural subjects in really nice way. Same goes for their handling of queer subjects and the more dark and bleak subjects; suicide and SH, among others.

Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, beyond all that is (or at least feels like), as Alexis Ong of Eurogamer put it, "[...] a beginner's Plato's Republic". It's a philosophy nerd game, while keeping the actual philosophy uncomplicated and accessible to an unknowing audience. (although a Greek philosophy nerd such as myself nearly spat out my alcohol-free champagne when the word 'entelechy' *actually* came up in the game) Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood deals both in hard topics and in pretty complex high-concept philosophy, both in the correct way to rule and govern, the nature of free will and destiny, the very concept of femininity, (which, of course, is the continuous thematic strike-through of the game, "sisterhood" is *in the title*) in digestible ways that are also equal parts fun and engaging for the player, again, thanks to the writing of the game.

To summarize?

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a brilliant masterclass in genre-mixing, writing and covering sensitive topics and high-concept philosophical theory, while remaining fun and enjoyable, with a lot of fun tie-backs throughout the game (although they do work best if you don't play the game like a cynical ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.) Also it's a part-time card game.

Planet zoo is a good game

This is a game that has a redemption arc like no other.

The game in itself was, when first released, a complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with almost as many bugs as Cyberpunk 2077, and a hell of a lot less to do
After that, the developers dissappered for a while, and everyone just thought thjey had taken the money and dipped. Then a lot of updates came to the game, and suddenly got better, with basebuilding and a story (however uninspired it may be.)
My point here is that it is a good game. It hasn't always been a good game, but it is now more than ever.

while the graphics might not've aged amazingly, the game is still really fun

very haha vibeo game

Undertale

At the wake of a new trend in indie games, the RPG-Maker horror game, including titles like Mad Father, Ao Oni and Ib came Undertale, a game with a fresh take on the indie genre. Where the former games all had focus on morally ambigous characters and edgy linear storylines with no genuine consequences, Undertale had a different goal in mind.

So good, i tried following what happened, and i was shot 8 times in the chest by the russian mafia

10/10 would play again!

great game with lots of time spent! i played the whole game on story mode, and it took 28 hours!! totally do it again