This Way Madness Lies Review (Ross)
Sailor Moon-esque schoolgirls magically travel to the worlds of Shakespeare's plays to defeat giant plants, snowmen, zombies and Lovecraftian monsters in This Way Madness Lies, a short and sweet RPG from Zeboyd Games. It follows in the footsteps of their previous game, Cthulhu Saves Christmas, with its brisk five-to-six hour runtime, lots of laughs, a fun battle system and a familiar format of dungeons broken up by story sections with fun skits.
It feels like each aspect of the gameplay has been made as convenient as possible without taking any fun out of the game. The number of encounters is never annoying, HP is full at the beginning of each battle, items aren't permanently consumed on use but instead have limitations on their use per battle, the party has one shared level so all characters level up together, there are no shops or inns, nothing is easy to miss, and so on. The experience is distilled down to just the best bits of a good RPG, without feeling at all lacking.
Battles are fun but the game is definitely on the easy side, thankfully though it's possible to change the difficulty mid-game as the bosses are much more fun with the difficulty ramped up. There's plenty of strategy in picking passive traits and abilities for each character to take into battle, and in making sure the right abilities are available when characters have their Hyper turn come around, which makes most abilities more powerful and grants some of them a bit more utility. That said, the game is short enough that it feels a shame there's not any kind of optional late or post-game dungeon with stronger enemies or any kind of superboss to really get a chance to use every tool the game offers.
I read all the text, fought all the enemies and opened every chest and was done in a bit over five hours, with the party level in the early 50s. Getting to level 99 brought the game time to a bit over nine hours and turned my sweet magical girls into angels of death and destruction capable of effortlessly and mercilessly annihilating all in their path.
The story's funny, it has great pacing and a satisfyingly silly finale. The characters have fun personalities, too. There are a lot of Shakespeare references but it's not necessary to be a fan or to even be particularly knowledgeable about any Shakespearean plays to enjoy what the game does with them.
The music and pixel art are great. Each Shakespearean location looks fantastic and the battles have a Golden Sun-like presentation that works really well in 16:9, especially with some of the bigger bosses.
The achievements are super easy. The only one that's really missable is answering a question about Shakespeare correctly, but there are plenty of opportunities to do so throughout the game.
This Way Madness Lies is an easy recommendation for anyone with a sense of humour and a love of turn-based RPGs.