Pep's Season of Spooks - Game 16
A sad and disturbing psychological horror that starts strongly with a "whodunit" regarding the fate of the titular Martha. Sadly, the game really starts to fall apart as the psychological themes become more and more prevalent, and by the end the game goes into some incredibly misguided places regarding mental health and lost me completely.

It's a real shame as the rest of the game had me highly invested, with the use of photography and a darkroom being a particular highlight. The unusual location of wartime Italy also adds some interesting historical context to the story. It's just a shame that all the good elements of the game will be overshadowed by it's reputation of being "the game that got censored by Sony".

Don't get me wrong, there are indeed a few gruesome, highly disturbing moments within the game, but I don't feel like they are there simply for shock value. They serve to highlight the mental deterioration of the player in a way remniscient of old psychological horror movies such as Repulsion and Possession. As a side note, I thought it was funny that the only scene that the game asked if I wanted to be censored was actually one of the tamer scenes.

I want to be able to recommend this, but the sheer misguided misery of the game's final act sadly outweighs the positives. When you add in some unnecessary padding it makes the game even harder to advocate. Martha Is Dead's intentions are good, but it falls flat on it's face at the final hurdle.

Scary Rating 3/10 - Overall Rating 5/10

As with the Remothered games, it's hard not to compare Martha Is Dead to Italian giallo horror of the 70s and 80s, and no not just because they're Italian but rather their bonkers plots and misguided, ham-fisted handling of mental health as a theme.

As with LKA's first title, The Town of Light, this one tends to feel more like an interactive story than a game. To my relief, MID's plot of twins, identity, supernatural fairytales and war crimes is incredibly compelling for the most part, with enough twists to evenly shift the pace. It also adds more refreshing varieties of gameplay, most notably the satisfyingly complex photography system, disturbing puppet theatre RPG and delightfully rigid morse code segments. The dream sequences, particularly ones where you run through a forest forming words of confession about your nefarious deeds, are also effectively creepy. Peak scary is simply those few moments of wandering around in the dark looking for your camera rolls in the woods or exploring an empty hidden bunker.
It's so frustrating then that all of these brilliant elements are criminally underused and fragmented, ultimately cutting the game short. I would've loved a game that takes even just the photography and fleshes it out over the rest of the game to solve further mysteries.

Instead, MID faces its downfall, similarly to Town of Light, when ditching nuanced supernatural mystery for clichéd portrayal mental health issues and relying subsequently on shocking gore scenes (censored for some people, ooooh). A few game breaking bugs and crashes further in also don't help.

But, complaints aside, the step up of visual storytelling and experimental gameplay mechanics make Martha Is Dead endlessly more entertaining than LKA's debut and a number of indie horror titles elsewhere, not to mention its absolutely gorgeous next-gen graphics (environments more so than people but still). If you see the game on offer, give it a bloody go!

Martha Is Dead is a really powerful experience that left a lasting impression on me. The story is the game’s strongest aspect, touching on themes of loss, war and personal identity in meaningful ways. This game features female body horror delivered in a no-nonsense manner, creepy dolls, and truly spectacular set-pieces that is a delight to horror fans like myself.

While the gameplay could have been improved and the horror elements could have been further emphasized, the game is still meaningful and thought-provoking gaming experience.

jogo forte sem duvidas, alguns pontos me fizeram destacar as coisas ruins nesse jogo ou q poderiam melhorar, algumas delas como, pré carregamento de locais para evitar queda de fps no jogo foi a principal coisa q me deixou morgado na game play, coisas do genero de n explorar tao bem a mecanica de fotografia, ela ta la em maior parte para quem quiser brincar de fotografo e ter a paciencia para usar a camera cm mecanicas da epoca em q se passa o jogo, mas com o decorrer da historia vc percebe q o foco n é so o uso da sua camera, e sim o plot pessoal q o jogo deixa para todas as pessoas q possam precisar de alguma ajuda, muito bem explorado o conceito das dificuldades q geralmente podem estar ao nosso lado e nao vemos, poderia existir mais jogos com estes focos e serem mais apreciados pelas outras pessoas

This was a disappointment.

Gotta start by pointing out that performance on PC is absolutely abysmal. Terrible performance on all graphics settings even with a a graphics card well overpowered for this game even on ultra. Massive frame rate drops, rubber banding, blurs and crashes. Game doesn't work at all with DX12 and hardly works on DX11. It sputters its way through. Audio drops, texture pop in. There's a litany of complains on the Steam forums or on countless websites about performance. Seems it was never fully rectified and at its worse renders the game completely unplayable.

If you are willing to push through the technical issues, you're rewarded with a delightfully mediocre experience. An inconsistent, slapdash story that tries to weave too many threads into a story that's never really cohesive and atmospheric enough to remain spooky. Tracking down maps and telegraphing morsecode to resistance fighters just isn't what I'm looking for in this sort of spooky walking sim. Too much detracts from the scary atmosphere and the shit performance gives ample amounts of frustration.

On Ultra settings the game is quite pretty, the music quite good and when you get the scares they are scary. Rarely cheesy or goofy. They stay in the moment and deliver suitable spooks. There's good moments here. It's why Martha is Dead is disappointing rather than just bad. There's some charm. There's some stuff you'll remember. But you'll spend more time lamenting that it wasn't better.

É um jogo com uma boa historia e bons plot, porém só isso, sem terror, muito monótono, e "decisões" que não influenciam em nada o jogo, a unica coisa interessante que fiz nele foi decifrar o codigo morse.

Pontos positivos:
-Historia e reviravoltas boas;
-Trilha sonora(mesmo que pouca)

Pontos negativos:
-Monótono;
-Podia explorar mais o terror;
-Muito mal otimizado.

★½

Let me start this review by stating that I truly enjoy the walking simulator genre. My favourite game of all time is Death Stranding, which obviously isn't your conventional walking simulator, but I also love games like Layers of Fear or Firewatch. Now, this game has some incredible graphics, an unbelievably realistic art style, and one of the most hauntingly beautiful soundtracks that I've heard in a video game. The setting is also interesting and allows for some interesting character backgrounds and motivations. However, that is about where my praise for the game ends. This game was seriously exhausting and excruciatingly boring. Firstly, similar to many other reviewers, I experienced horrible optimization issues and was plagued by low FPS throughout my entire playthrough. I also experienced multiple instances where I had to close and reload the game because it either completely froze or questlines would break and would not allow me to progress. To relate back to my original comment about walking simulators, I think many of the gameplay aspects of this game should have been left out of the game (and allowed it to only be a walking simulator), as many of these mechanics were either inconsequential or excruciatingly tedious. There are game components that I do not think that you should have the player do, and should just perform them for the player. The camera was an interesting mechanic for the first few times, but is only used 4-5 times throughout the entire story, but the worst mechanic was the telegraph. You had to fully code and decode morse code messages, which took an incredible amount of time and was not fun as a gameplay mechanism at all. I also played the game in the native Italian language and I thought the voice acting was subpar, where the main actress did not feel emotionally invested and provided emotion and enthusiasm in the wrong places. Furthermore, I feel as though the story is more akin to an audiobook than playing a video game. The main story beats are told through text on a black screen and major plot points are either told in this method or skipped over so quickly you are not given enough time to emotionally process them. Similarly, I don't think the story itself is meaningful, powerful, or important in any way. The story is terribly shallow and told in way that does properly emphasize or draw importance to mental health. Finally, the ending is probably the worst part of the entire game. The last ~30 minutes are probably one of my least favourite video games moments ever. The entire story is poorly summarized in a puppet show (telling the story that we have already seen and telling it in a really poor medium). The ending itself does not pack the deep emotional punch that they think it does or that it should based on the subject matter. Moreover, the gore and extreme visuals feel as though they're added just for the sake of having them present rather than beginning importance to the story or themes. Ultimately, I expected a lot more from this game and felt like it severely underdelivered and was definitely disappointed.

Adventure games that both have shock value and a good story are rare and hard to come by, sadly, Martha is Dead is not one of those. You would mistakenly think this is some sort of horror game with monsters and demons, but it's barely even that. This is a ghost story, a story about battling mental illness, and a story about surviving WWII in Axis Italy. You play Guilia who is Martha's twin sister. This is a detective game more than anything with plot twists and an interesting vintage camera system.

The game starts out simple enough. Introducing controls, the plot, character building, the whole nine yards that adventure games typically put you through. Martha is Dead's best feature is the camera system. While you can take photos anywhere (I don't know why you would) you need it for specific plot points. Guilia is trying to talk to The White Lady of the lake and find out why her sister died. This is kind of the first half of the story as it jumps around so much. The game is very plodding, slow, and constantly leads you on for little payoff. Taking photos for objectives is simple enough. Just get the focus and distance right and snap the photo. You then get to develop the photo, but instead of taking you through the entire complicated process, the game explains to you what that is and says it cut 90% out for better gameplay. Why? You just focus and position the negative for exposure and then develop it in liquid but the point you stop it is the same for every photo. A pretty lame "mini-game" if you ask me with tons of lost potential.

With the camera feature out of the way, there are other small gameplay things you do such as a morse code mini-game which I actually enjoyed. I had to look up a morse code chart online and decipher it myself. That was actually well done and made me think, but that's the only part that did. 75% of the game is spent in Guilia's house or the wood's winding paths. There are a few scenes where you control a motorboat, but it's just to get to the other side of the lake. You are mostly wandering around at a slow pace going from point A to B and interacting with objects. Go check out the graveyard, go back to the house and develop the photo, go back to the lake and find an underground bunker, go back to the house and put up a flag. The constant backtracking is tiring and clearly used for filler.

Then the last hour of the game is zero gameplay. It consists of long puppet shows recapping the entire story like you already didn't know what happened. The story thinks it's more complicated than it is. Honestly, the puppet shows are cool-looking, but they didn't advance the story. The story here gets recapped numerous times in various forms which are really annoying and make the player feel dumb. After the puppet show stuff you just walk around interesting scenes with narration and that's it. The best parts of the game are the gory death scenes which are pretty nutty. They would make Mortal Kombat fans blush. But in total, this is maybe five minutes of the entire game. There's a bike you can ride, but the control is terrible and it's only used to ride around the house and surrounding path, so what's the point with that?

Then there are the visuals. Yes, the game looks damn good. Crazy detailed textures, amazing lighting effects, and models, and it just looks like a AAA title, but at what cost? The game runs horribly on even my RTX 2080 that's overclocked. There is ray tracing in the game, but I couldn't tell the difference between that and ultra graphics settings. I feel this was put in more for next-gen consoles for a subtle effect. The game has constant stutters, frame drops, weird frame rates with ray tracing on, and even DLSS set to ultra-performance. At 3440x1440 I had scenes that ran at above 60FPS with ray tracing on and then I would turn around and the frames would drop by over half. Without DLSS? Forget it. The game would drop into single digits one second and then inside the house it would be 90FPS. Super terrible optimization all around here and even with DLSS set to ultra-performance without ray tracing I still saw dips under 60FPS. Totally unacceptable. DLSS shouldn't be used as a crutch.

Overall, Martha is Dead mostly relies on shock value for the few scenes that have it. It's neither a horror game nor a puzzle game. It's just an adventure game with various story elements tossed together with boring backtracking and little gameplay to keep you interested. The photo mode is ambitious but purposefully handicapped when it could have been as robust as real-life photography back in WWII. It's a missed opportunity. The game spoils itself constantly with frequent story recaps and in the end, there's a final plot twist. The story runs its course about two-thirds of the way through and you're left with a giant recap scene with no crazy finale that most adventure games have.

7/10

It's one of the best "historical games" I've ever played. At times it's kinda naive in its storytelling, and perhaps it's too ambitious towards its ending but undoubtedly it has design and narrative intuitions that are so great, intelligent, and moving that I couldn't but enjoy it.

The game revolves around identity, (historical) agency, and remembering. The loss of self is associated with a loss of memory, and the game as a whole deals with remembering something that is usually forgotten in current history and historical games, i.e., marginalised individuals, frailty, mental ilness, and so on. The game is about war but it's not a war game: it's about a girl, someone that history usually forgets. All we do as we play is striving to remember: we mostly take photos, develop them, read things, re-enact overlong technological practices that are now long gone. Remembering is both diegetic and extra-diegetic: Giulia strives to remember and playing itself is an act of remembering.

The puppets make this convergence of theme, narrative, and gameplay even more explicit: playing with them is an analogon of playing the game, in both we uncover terrible forgotten truths. And both are dramatically linear, hauntingly suspended between reality and fiction, and pre-determined by someone (the designer or Giulia herself, both are puppet masters within their respective textual framework).

The greatest thing is that playing with these puppets is the only way to remember what actually (?) happened. In a similar guise, we play with the game to remember someone who's usually forgotten, a puppet of history among others, whose agency was denied.

Censored content is something you shouldn't miss: please play uncensored versions of the game.

[Podcast incoming for all the Italian speakers interested ;)]

1. Alcuni avvenimenti particolarmente impattanti non hanno un adeguato accompagnamento musicale e accadono fin troppo in fretta;
2. Il doppiaggio, sia in italiano che in inglese, è atroce (fa eccezione unicamente la protagonista stessa, che occasionalmente a sua volta offre performance abbastanza scadenti);
3. Occasionali problemi nel mixaggio audio;
4. Gli attori non riescono assolutamente mai a trasmettere la tragicità o importanza di un evento attraverso il doppiaggio stesso (a parte la madre della protagonista, una volta o due);
5. C'è un certo shock value, e il tutto è orchestrato in un modo interessante in termini di agentività richiedendo semplici azioni da parte del giocatore (banalmente, un esempio è la rimozione del volto di un altro essere umano). Queste scene assumono particolare forza grazie al fatto che la protagonista, col tempo, non sembra più essere in grado di distinguere il sogno, la fantasia e i ricordi dalla realtà e dal presente: credo, però, che ciò accada in modo troppo disordinato e che la discesa non ci sia una buona direzione (specie man mano che vengono trovati documenti che testimonino quanto realmente accaduto). Ciò si ricollega al fatto che la protagonista è effettivamente affetta da un grave disturbo, ma, anche tenendo ciò in considerazione, ci sono varie situazioni ed elementi nel gioco che non mi tornano;
7. Il ritmo stesso degli eventi è, spesso, sconclusionato e irragionevole: in particolare il simil-spiegone con l'impiego delle marionette immediatamente successivo a un interrogatorio subito da parte di soldati tedeschi. Tutto ciò può essere giustificato se consideriamo che - PLOT TWIST - nulla è reale tutto è lecito, e in questo caso andate a fare in culo;
7. A un certo punto, c'è un pigro e centrale plot twist à la Shyamalan e quindi ripeto il mio sonoro vaffanculo diocane;
8. L'utilizzo della macchina fotografica è potenzialmente molto interessante ma, in questo gioco, sfruttato fin troppo poco all'interno del gameplay.