The game takes place in and around a family villa which is beautifully created and really does look stunning. Now don’t get us wrong, we love a good bit of tension building when it comes to horror, after all, atmosphere is the order of the day if you want to brown those pants, but the pacing for Martha is Dead is way off. What starts off promising soon begins to lose steam as the game descends from a promising dark narrative to a clunky walking simulator. Throughout the game we were tasked with taking and developing pictures of items that are key to the narrative in order to progress the story, this mechanic is well designed for the most part but soon becomes something of a tedious exercise. The first hour or so of Martha is Dead is very well-paced, we get the event that sets up the story and a few tutorials on some of the core mechanics, the main one being the emphasis on photography. The narrative also sits alongside another fairly bleak situation known as World War 2 which delivers some interesting weave to an already twisted set-up. Maintaining this persona is the driving force of the narrative as the relationship with your mother is explored with a mix of psychological and supernatural occurrences. This adds an interesting hook to start things off as it becomes clear that Julia has always felt neglected by her parents and will now spend the rest of her life living as her sister who just happened to be deaf. Set in 1944 Italy, Marth is Dead begins with the player, Julia, finding her twin sister Martha dead in a lake, after a rather gruesome but bloody awesome sequence of symbolism involving skin pizza, Julia assumes the role of her dead sister.
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