As it is in many Soulslikes, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers expects you to die multiple times, but it brings the Madness system to make all the effort pay off in one way or another.
Madness can make you stronger, but at the expense of raising the difficulty bar of already hard encounters. That’s why learning how Madness affects the game and how to respond to it is fundamental to enjoying and progressing in Wuchang: Fallen Feathers. There might be moments where you want to take advantage of the power you gain, or situations you’d rather play safe.
In this Wuchang: Fallen Feathers guide, we explain how the Madness system works and how to reduce your Madness level so you can learn how to prepare and customize your character for each encounter in the game.
How the Madness system works in Wuchang: Fallen Feathers
In Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, the main character has an inner demon that grows stronger depending on how much Madness you have. In practical terms, Madness is a gauge that fills in a bit when you die or kill non-Feathered humanoids, and it gives buffs and debuffs to your character.
After a couple of tests, we learned that, regardless of how you died — maybe you were fatally hit by an enemy’s powerful attack or you fell from a bridge into a creek — you gain 15 Madness points.
Dying is not the only method to gain Madness and fill in the gauge. Some consumable items can increase your Madness level, like Maddening Incense which also prevents the loss of Madness temporarily. Your level of Madness may also increase if you use the Invoke menu when worshipping shrines to buy items.
Some effects activate depending on the percentage of the gauge you’ve currently filled in. Above 90%, you start dealing more damage and earning more red mercury when defeating enemies, but you take more damage as well.
At the same time, being between 50% and 90% makes you lose most of your red mercury when you die. As an example, we had 140 when testing this and were left with only 42 after dying. Although the game says that you lose all your red mercury when above 90% of the gauge is filled in, in our tests, we still had some after dying.
You can keep track of your Madness level by using the small portrait on the bottom left side of the screen. By accessing the character menu, you can see the exact number of Madness points you already have alongside a visual representation of it. Wuchang’s appearance changes depending on the character’s Madness level, starting with red-glowing eyes and ending with demonic red marks appearing on her body in later stages.
How to reduce Madness in Wuchang: Fallen Feathers
A high level of Madness might give your attacks in Wuchang: Fallen Feathers an extra kicker, but it also makes every enemy more difficult to face. If you don’t want to make this game harder to finish, don’t fret. There are some methods to reduce your Madness in Wuchang: Fallen Feathers.
The simplest method to get your Madness gauge back to zero is by killing or dying to your Inner Demon. When you reach max Madness level, your Inner Demon will materialize from the red mercury you dropped on the ground and attack you, if you go to the last place you died.
You can either kill them or be killed. In both cases, your Madness gauge gets cleansed. While the former is better since you recover the red mercury you’ve lost, the latter also works if all you want is to remove the debuff you receive from Madness.
If you haven’t reached max Madness level, there are other solutions. Killing Feathered enemies will reduce some Madness. For example, defeating a regular zombie-like enemy removes one Madness point. If you want to cleanse more Madness, you can also use a fragment of Divine Gift or Divine Gift by interacting with the statue you find in Shu Sanctum.