Martha is Dead [Xbox]
Developed by LKA, Martha is Dead is a psychological horror game with dark themes set during the summer of 1945. You play as Giulia, daughter of a Nazi general, who finds her twin sister Martha dead in a nearby lake; a lake that is said to be home to the ghost of the White Lady - a woman killed by her lover long ago and whose story Giulia listened to many times growing up. After finding her sister’s lifeless body, their parents rush down to the waters’ edge, mistaking the twins and thinking that the surviving sister is Martha. Left uncorrected, this lie continues as Giulia assumes the role of her deaf, mute twin - whilst she tries to uncover what happened at the lake that fateful day.
After the reports of Martha is Dead being edited for the PlayStation release, I wondered what could possibly be so ‘dark’ as to require this. Playing through the game, you’ll come across a few sections that allow you to skip certain interactions, and these seem to be the parts that have been toned down/censored for PlayStation; namely, a rather grisly nightmare scene where you’ll slice - and then peel - the face off of your twin, signifying her identity being stolen by you. Likewise, further grim scenes play out later in the story, that understandably come with warnings due to including triggering content such as baby loss and self harm.
With a realistic look across the world, it has a very eerie vibe that permeates the house as well as the surrounding forest. For a large part of my initial time spent playing, I’d cautiously walk through the forest anticipating something to jump scare me - but nothing happened aside from one or two tame encounters. It thrives off of having you feeling creeped out and uncomfortable, more than it actually does anything typically horror-y. The line between reality and Giulia’s fracturing mind becomes steadily blurred, with the story having lots of twists and turns that have you struggling to reconcile what you believe might have gone on. Is the White Lady involved? Was it your mother? Someone else? You? I changed my mind about what I thought was going on about 10 times, each time surer than the last that I’d figured it out, so it was good to keep me guessing.
The voice acting is in Italian when you first boot up the game, although can be changed to other languages from the menu, so I switched it over to English just for ease - however this did make the acting take on a slightly less convincing tone from when it was in Italian. Later in the story, Giulia comes across her childhood puppet theatre, and uses it to re-enact moments from her childhood, and these can feel very unbearable to watch, with Giulia acting out each of the ‘characters’ in the puppet show, including scenes of abuse in the form of her mother beating her with a cane and taking out her anger on the family dog. The soundtrack is done really well, and really emphasises the emotion of particular scenes, with the music slowly coming into play where needed.
There are a lot of really interesting mechanics involved, such as taking photos - a pastime Giulia gained from her father, and one that may help her to solve what really happened to Martha. You’ll find different camera attachments and accessories over the course of the game, allowing you to take photos in different lighting, as well as allowing for Macro shots and infrared filters to be used to pick up ghostly apparitions. There’s something really satisfying about whipping out the clunky old camera and manually adjusting to get a good shot; and this can be done both for story-related tasks as well as just taking photos of whatever takes your fancy. Once you’ve taken the photos you’ll need to return to the dark room to develop them, and this is another really enjoyable aspect - and for people who aren’t as into it (as it can be quite time consuming), you can skip through the steps to speed things up.
I ran into quite a significant amount of bugs whilst playing, that became more and more frustrating as time went on. The first few bugs I came across actually were more funny than frustrating, with the first allowing me to walk straight across the lake to the other side, wandering through a forest that you never need to visit through the actual story (and eventually having me falling endlessly, with the moon shining above me). The second caused much of the furniture in the house not to spawn, instead leaving scorch-marks where they should be - and this admittedly caused me not to realise it was an issue for a while, instead blaming Giulia’s declining mental-state - and finally, an issue with my bike getting stuck on a surface before pinging me into the sky à la the infamous GTAIV swing-glitch had me absolutely roaring with laughter. But other issues were definitely much harder to deal with.
The difficult-to-watch scenes often had to be replayed due to frustrating glitches causing the game to crash during them, directly after them, or just causing the game to shut down altogether. Towards the end, you have to cycle your bike to town, and the game will trigger a warning if you try to cross the small bridge on foot. There are other things that can be done across this bridge other than going to town however, and this caused a problem for me when I rode my bike over the bridge to take some photos before absent-mindedly running back over to the house to develop the photos - only to find that I now couldn’t go retrieve my bike as it was across the bridge (made even more frustrating by the warning again telling me I can’t go to town on foot, when my bike was in direct sight about 3 steps away on the other side of this invisible barrier).
Martha is Dead is a game I am struggling to decide how I feel about it. It started out so strong, and the mystery of things kept me intrigued. Paired with the interesting mechanics and gorgeously grisly visuals, I was really enjoying it. But as the story went on and became marred by an abundance of issues, and having to relive certain difficult scenes 5+ times due to various problems, it really began to grate on me. Priced at £24.99 on the Xbox Store, Martha is Dead is expensive for the experience you currently get, particularly as it is quite a short game even without all of the bugs. But once the bugs are dealt with and if you’re looking for a decent psychological puzzle-horror - providing you can stomach the darkness - then it would be worth checking out.
In the end, we decided to give Martha is Dead the Collecting Asylum rating of 7/10.
Are you interested in Martha is Dead? What do you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to Wired Productions for the Martha is Dead Xbox review code!
