Martha Is Dead starts extremely strong and immediately introduces a dynamic between the twin sisters Martha and Giulia, which sets the scene for the entire game. Giulia’s mother never loved her as much as she loved Martha, and this relationship or its absence devoured Giulia’s mood for years. After Giulia finds Martha drowned in a lake, her mother runs to hug Giulia, mistakenly believing that her least beloved child is dead. Finally, she gets the love and affection she has always wanted. What happens next is unexpected, even breathtaking, and I was immediately fascinated by the premise. Unfortunately, Martha Is Dead quickly becomes a chore.
I didn’t feel okay with the Gameplay when I started exploring Giulia’s family villa. Walking feels like walking through mud, which is especially frustrating, because this game is all about walking around and interacting with objects to find out more about what’s going on. From time to time, you go through poorly explained dream scenarios or participate in simple mini-games, such as using a camera and its photos to find answers to who was by the lake the night Martha expired. However, most often they walk around a lot and look at each other a lot. A scenario allows you to avoid an enemy, which creates tensions that, I wish, would be more present in other areas of the game. But because most of what they do is on foot, the game feels less like traditional horror and more like a story that unfolds and is inherently horrible.
To make matters worse, The interaction with objects is also annoying. By pressing the right Stick, the interactive objects become visible, which quickly becomes annoying because the icons on the screen disappear in a few seconds. As a result, I kept pressing the right thumb. As if to make this annoyance an even greater stumbling block, the controls sometimes change completely. Instead of interacting with an object by pulling the trigger, you inexplicably have to press A. These frustrations, combined with errors in stopping progress, began to demolish the initial plot that I felt when opening.
Interaction with certain objects, such as letters or the body of your dead sister, leads to secondary goals. None of them are as engaging as the main secret, but a handful of side tangents are usable, like the one where I found a tire pump to unlock a bike that made trips to the Villa a little faster. For some, I had to use an in-game camera that can be equipped with accessories that modify the use of the camera and skins that are purely cosmetic collectibles. I enjoyed the mechanics surrounding the focus, the distance, the types of lenses and much more of the camera, such as using the directional pad to focus an image. I was glad that the camera was also a big part of the main lens. The game’s darkroom, where I had to develop my photos with a timer and the controller sticks in a realistic old-school way, made using this camera even more immersive.
Despite some attractive segments, many targets are poorly fermented or poorly explained. For example, I spent 30 minutes looking for a side quest key (at least I thought so), but after realized that I could only get it when I completed an important Moment in the story much after in the game. I wish the LKA had done a better job of indicating when you can’t advance on a quest until the main story progresses.
For a game that relies so heavily on narrative, the Martha Is Dead story pushed me in the wrong direction in many ways. In some of the most important moments of the game, you will be invited to sympathize with Martha and Giulia’s parents: a Nazi general and a woman who seems unimpressed with being married to a Nazi. I especially enjoyed helping the Italian resistance forces defeat the Nazis near my family’s Villa. Oddly enough, however, the game asked me if I wanted to help the Italian resistance actioners or thwart their plans by telling my Nazi father about them. Of course, I did not consider this Option. The LKA weaved great narrative threads into the family dynamic, but I didn’t connect with them because I would never sympathize with a Nazi.
In those moments, I was frightened. There are ways in which the games used the Nazis to tell interesting stories, but this was not the matter. Martha Is Dead doesn’t praise the Nazis or even show her support for them, but the family’s Nazi connection doesn’t play anything other than the fact that WW2 is taking place. The parents are only used to amplify Guilia’s torment and trauma, but her Nazi belief is not one aspect of it. Why are they Nazis and why does it matter in Martha Is Dead that it’s you? These are questions that I would like to have answered. The LKA uses the war around this Villa to demonstrate the grip that Nazi Germany lost on Italy in 1944, and Giulia’s father must finally bear the consequences of his role in this, but instead of taking advantage of this Moment to show him that he is getting what he deserves, Martha is dead instead uses this storytelling stunt to torment Giulia further.
