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!
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!