The two-man team at Zeboyd Games had some difficulty getting their games onto the Switch initially - which, boy, imagine Nintendo not letting someone on the Switch eShop - but an agreement with Limited Run Games has allowed their last couple of projects to land on the platform. Their third Switch project This Way Madness Lies is closer to their prior game Cthulhu Saves Christmas in that it’s a brief RPG with absolutely no concept of a fourth wall, and it’s a beautiful thing that you can have a full RPG experience in a light weekend’s worth of play.

The concept of This Way Madness Lies is the very dartboard concept of “Shakespearean drama but with magical girls”. The Stratford-Upon-Avon Drama Society are the main characters, all of whom are named after the bard’s female characters (the lead is Imogen, as in the Cymbeline princess) who have to juggle school and their theater company while also transforming into warriors that enter the worlds of Shakespeare plays to make sure the play goes as written. Interspersed with the dimension-hopping are occasional quizzes (given by every teacher but their English teacher due to reasons of ever-increasing absurdity), and Imogen blatantly asks the player (or the “Impresario”) to look up the answers on the internet. If you had limited exposure to the works of Shakespeare, the game helpfully provides a modern interpretation:

The core RPG plays out from a 2D overhead view, with limited on-map enemy encounters. Once an enemy is engaged, the four people (Imogen, two of her teammates, and the namesake of a member of the team) who jumped into the dimension have to eliminate the invaders in turn-based combat. Battle order is generally decided by the speed stats of the characters, and each party member has a palette of skills that can be chosen for various elements or status effects. The one weakness of the battle system - the inability to select who goes into the worlds - is mostly offset by the post-battle experience being assigned to the Society in general rather than particular party members; when other cast members sub in after not being used for a while they don’t suffer statistically compared to the ones who have always been present. Though I do wish I could pick the two free slots, since party members only seem to learn new battle skills or develop innate “traits” when they’re actually in the party.

There are two keys to a successful comedy RPG: the jokes have to be funny, and it can’t let the jokes get old. Madness succeeds on both fronts; even on the highest of the game’s four difficulties, you can get out in under 10 hours for a playthrough. And the writing is top-notch, paying off all of the gags at one point and taking swipes at everything from the absurdity of Shakespeare’s comedies to tropes of the magical girl genre it’s paying homage to.

I did skip the sequence a couple of times. Of course, I'm also a cat person.

On the technical side, this is not the first rodeo for the studio making a 2D RPG so there’s no issues once the game starts. There is, however, a decently long load time on initial boot in both modes (though it did feel worse in handheld). The graphics are high-quality 2D art, and each party member looks different enough that you’ll associate them almost immediately upon their entry into the party. The soundtrack uses a lot of period pieces, which I did enjoy as well.

It seems as though the Zeboyd partnership is going on hiatus for a bit to recharge the batteries, but This Way Madness Lies is a nice game to go on break with. It’s more of a sonnet than a full-on Shakespeare play, and the Switch definitely needs something short in this realm after some of the absolute marathons I’ve had to deal with recently.