Martha Is Dead – Spotlight
You’d probably go with Martha is Dead if you wanted to make a game that was censored. Despite its short length, this horror indie game packs a tonne of child abuse, self-inflicted harm, torture, and Nazis into a few hours of gameplay.
the storey of an Italian teenager dealing with the death of her twin and the tensions of World War II in Martha is Dead, a minimally-interactive adventure game or a very interactive walking simulator. Giulia is on a mission to discover what happened, carrying a camera and snooping around her house and the nearby woods. However, this is one of those games where tinkering with any one thread quickly unravels the rest of the storey, and it all begins to make sense in a way that’s a little unnerving. In a flash, you’re taking pictures of your dead sister, dealing with the unpleasant side effects of a menstrual crisis, and phoning mental health facilities under the false pretence of being your abused mother.
However, Martha Is Dead has a lot to offer the horror fan – female body horror in a non-exploitative way; creepy puppets; truly shocking set pieces – but gameplay that feels like an afterthought encases it all. The plodding back and forth between the same locations to complete this or that menial task is ‘just a bit too slow to be fun.’ Early on, you get a bicycle, but using it is worse than walking, and there are some old sins, like finding a pair of bolt cutters but not being able to pick them up until you trudge over to the door that is, surprise, locked with a padlock. Like a show that was in love with itself and didn’t know when to end, a creepy puppet theatre, an initially effective way of showing past events, drags on for far too long.
Using a telegraph system to communicate with the resistance made me wonder how many characters in this game failed to stand up to the Nazis because they simply couldn’t be bothered. Even after translating and coding my own messages, as well as taping out the dashes and dot marks, I couldn’t take it any more. At first glance, this looked like a pledge of allegiance to my Nazi father, but it was really just a complaint about the equipment. Gen-Z was also delighted to discover the rotary phone as a relic of days gone by. The storey snippets provided by this phone interaction were enjoyable, but it was a pain to use on a controller. There’s nothing wrong with paying tribute to history, but finding a manual for it in an old shed felt like a safety net against the possibility that a large portion of the audience would simply stare at the dial aghast.
That being said, the game could have used more photography mechanics. Pigs are slaughtered and graves are haunted in this Life Is Strange-esque spin-off game. There are a few things around the world marked with a small camera icon that you can photograph to learn more about their history, but you are free to photograph anything you find. There are a lot of extra lenses and film in the game that aren’t necessary to complete any of the objectives, so I found myself experimenting and cataloguing things just for fun. It didn’t bother me at all that each photograph had to be developed in the darkroom using a time-consuming but ultimately rewarding process of framing, exposure, and chemical immersion.
As you progress through the game, the horror intensifies, much like the decomposition of a corpse. A wiener dog suffers a terrible fate as a result of sinister vibes, questionable mental health, and a raging psychosis. Only PlayStation has censored it (Xbox and PC have the full experience) because there are few sentient beings who won’t find some part of the game truly upsetting. This is a version of the game that has been edited by its own creator, right down to the developer’s bookends, which include warnings about potential triggers and links to a mental health charity.
One scene made my trigger fingers stop in their tracks as I realised what was about to happen, and my screenshot folder looks like an accident at an abattoir. If you think I’m a horror novice, you’d be wrong. What Pascal Laugier has done with his version of Martyrs is nothing short of a masterpiece in my opinion. In the end, though, there’s an awkward moment when you’re cutting open a corpse in the middle of the Nazi-flag encampment.
While it’s best not to share Martha is Dead with just anyone, fans of Haute Tension-style horror films who are willing to put up with the game’s sporadic gameplay should definitely give it a shot. It’s a game that will be talked about, debated, and reacted to for years to come. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you, or that PlayStation or the developer hadn’t.
