"Murderworld!"
The issue before this is actually not in my collection, so I skipped directly from #144 to this, and it appears I missed a lot. This issue was written by Chris Claremont, and illustrated by Dave Cockrum and Josef Rubinstein, who are apparently no longer just "guest artists", but took over the art from John Byrne after issue 143. And they have a lot to illustrate here.
The villains of this issue are Arcade, a villain who creates deadly theme park traps that never manage to actually kill anyone, and Doctor Doom, who is Doctor Doom. They are working against each other but also enemies. The main X-Men have been captured by Doom and held in overly elaborate traps to test/punish them, while a back-up team of X-Men (Ice-Man, Havoc, Banshee and Polaris) break into Arcade's "Murderworld" to rescue hostages...all while having long interior monologues explaining the different relationships between themselves. And Storm has been imprisoned inside/transmuted into an organic statue, which has triggered her claustrophobia and made her subconsciously summon a gigantic storm...
Okay, there is even more to it then that, but the basic idea to me is that this is classic comic book zaniness. Supervillains try to fool each other with elaborate ruses, and imprison superheroes in even more elaborate traps inside their improbably large castle/fortresses/bases. In this story, our X-Men must fight against both robotic hockey players and merry-go-round horses...all while Doctor Doom and the foppish arcade trade Bond villain dialog at the top of the tower of Doom's fortress (which is somehow in upstate New York?) And I am here for it. This has all the high-silliness and contrived plots of a Silver Age comic. It is also a break from the more serious plots of the past issues. And, as also mentioned, although their are some melodramatic soliloquies about the complicated interpersonal affairs of the X-Men, there is as yet no talk of "tolerance" or "Xavier's Dream of peaceful coexistence".