Martha is Dead features floating corpses, nightmarish chases through dark woods, dreams about mutilation, and creepy funerals. It’s important to get that detail out of the way early, especially since the game itself is so keen to warn you about what is to come. Thanks to the discourse around Boyfriend Dungeon and Twelve Minutes, trigger warnings in gaming have been a huge bone of contention recently, and Martha is Dead is stuffed with them – the trigger warning descriptions are so graphic I’m sure some people will argue the trigger warnings need triggers warnings – and I’m going to talk about that content here, so it only seems fair to point that out.
That’s not the only reason I bring these issues up, however. You can listen to TheGamer Podcast episode three for my full insight on how the demand for trigger warnings and consistent paranoid readings have been damaging for art, but still, the content is worth discussing upfront, mostly because Martha is Dead does not fancy itself as a horror game. In my full interview with Luca Dalco, creative director at LKA, he argues the case for Martha is Dead not being a horror, and after a couple of hours with the game in a hands-on preview, I’m inclined to agree.
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It’s never Martha is Dead’s intention to scare you. There are no jump scares, no monsters, and nothing that needs to be killed. It’s less a horror movie and more of a horror novel. It’s a slow burn chiller of a game, and in my couple of hours with it, that slow burn never got hot enough – or perhaps the chill never got cold enough – for my body to deviate from room temperature. It’s difficult to evaluate a game based on what might be its potential if you give it a few more hours to sink under your skin, but Martha is Dead clearly has the makings of a deeply unsettling experience.
In the opening moments, it feels more like you're performing for the game than actively playing it. It takes its cues from the likes of What Remains of Edith Finch, where set actions must be performed as part of a story you participate in but rarely shape in any meaningful way, but it exerts even more control. You begin by taking a photograph, but actually, you don't. You push specific buttons to fix the camera, adjust the focus, and so on, before you realise there is a body in the lake you're currently snapping. A cutscene starts and you're directed to walk down a linear path, before another cutscene kicks in to take control away from you yet again.
After this you jump into a new scene where you're in a room with nothing – literally nothing – to do. You can fiddle with the radio, but there are no clues or puzzles to be found. Instead, you have control enough to wander around during what is really a glorified cutscene, before someone mentions flowers. At this point, you can pick the flowers up and place them on a podium, and the puzzle is over before it began. I'm sure, like the horror, the gameplay will grow more expansive as the game goes on, but even when I had maximum control towards the end of the preview, there was little to do besides walk around, read some text, and participate in fairly light puzzles.
The dream sequences, to their credit, are the best part of the game. I only got to play through one, but I hope it's a recurring theme in the full release. In this dream I needed to control the knife in my hand as I sliced gruesome slivers off a corpse, even affixing parts of them to my own skin. That was after I had to write my own fears while running through the forest, selecting the right word or phrases each time to best explore my own psyche. Choose wrong, and you stumble, careened back to the start of the dream with scuffed knees.
Much like the horror and the gameplay, Martha is Dead’s narrative didn't quite have enough room to breathe in my preview. Done well, however, the story could be the game's strongest area. I'm not particularly desperate to know what happens next in the mystery of Martha, so much as I want to see the story of the protagonist herself.
You play as a young girl in 1944 Tuscany, just before the turn of the tide in the war – or at least, before you are aware of it. Your father is a Nazi officer, and so while others in the village are feeling the effects of rationing, you are always well fed. You don’t appear to have much awareness of what your father is doing, but still, the nature of the game is uncomfortable. While you aren't playing as a Nazi, you are playing as someone who directly benefits from the horrors of the Nazi regime – yet you appear completely ignorant of them. As a young Italian teenager, you would simply think your country was at war, especially with Papa telling you that you're the good guys.
This makes for a fascinating backdrop to the game. With LKA being Italian, the game has been made with authenticity. We are too accustomed to good guys versus bad guys in games. Even as gaming matures and begins to explore grey areas, the Nazis are, understandably, left out. They're the baddies. They inflicted unspeakable horrors on the world, and gaming's revenge is to make them into zombies so we can double-kill them. But not every citizen who lived in Germany and Italy in the 1940s was evil. Many were scared, and others were unaware of the monstrous inner workings of the Nazi regime. People knew they were fascists, but regular citizens of Tuscany could not be expected to know of the experiments at Birkenau, only discovered after the fall of the Third Reich. Our heroine is a sympathetic figure, but she’s also a Nazi, yet the game never asks you to sympathise with Nazis themselves. It’s a delicate balance, worthy of further inspection.
Every aspect of Martha is Dead has potential. The way it addresses horror in games, its willingness to explore gore through a more artistic lens, its central mystery, and the surrounding story of rising tensions for the Axis powers. Realistically, that the preview left me hoping it would fill its potential rather than expecting it suggests it will probably fumble on at least one element, but it will be fascinating to see what it delivers on.
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