February was quite a month for video game releases. From the long-anticipatedElden Ringto the sequelHorizon: Forbidden West,gamers had plenty to choose from when it came to bigger titles with expansive scopes. However, there was also another smaller game that generated some buzz for its gruesome violence and intriguing premise. The game,Martha Is Dead, is available on all platforms and takes place in 1944 Italy as you learn about the sad fate of two twin sisters: Martha and Giulia. Early on, Martha dies in a mysterious incident down by the water near the family’s home and Giulia takes her place. The rest of the game is about pretending and reality slowly descending into horror. It is a game that isn’t afraid to create shocking imagery, though it falls short of being truly horrifying in any meaningful way.
Horror in video games can be tricky. After all, the pacing and timing of the dread that is created are often in the hands of the player. It is you who is in control of how quickly you move through a scene and whether you go along the path the creators intended. Still, if the game is well-designed and thought out you can ensure the fear you wanted to strike into the player is received. This is not an easy feat and extends beyond just the construction of the game into the writing of the narrative. This is especially true for a game likeMartha Is Deadthat, despite some initial promise, soon gets so lost in itself that it becomes more tedious than terrifying.
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Despite the attention it got for the more gory aspects, these elements are not enough to make it a well-rounded horror game. Any significance to these shocking scenes begins to fade and becomes muddled very quickly, no matter how many it keeps throwing at you. Early on, there is a scene where you remove the face of your sister. Later, you do even further horrific things to her as your mind begins to unravel. These scenes are not for the faint of heart, though to see such violence is not the issue with the game. Having visceral moments could leave a lasting impact if they weren’t part of a game that never builds into a cohesive whole.
Instead, they feel merely thrown in without any sort of weight or consequence for the rest of the game’s story. Said story mostly sees you wandering around the same location without much of anything ominous happening at all. The game relies on what could be an interesting photo element for most of its gameplay. However, it begins to become rather repetitive the more it requires you to go around and capture specific images that you then develop. The game is not a long one, though it feels much longer when you work through a task list that begins to feel more like a chore than they do interesting gameplay.
These issues persist even when the game is running smoothly, something that is not always a guarantee. In my experience playing on thePlayStation, there was an inundation of error messages and times when I found myself falling through the bottom of the map no matter how many restarts I tried at other checkpoints. That then required having to play through a large portion of the game that I already had gone through to even get back to where it broke. That is before even getting into other issues, like when the sound of the ambiance of bugs in the forest will cut in and out when you round a specific corner. Another low point is when you take a trip out on the boat to get to a new area. In addition to being just generally clunky to maneuver, the boat itself clips through the water at weird times, and the sound of the engine is stuck on a loop that you’re able to’t get out of your head. These may sound like nitpicks, but they break the already fragile immersion of the experience. The game tries to paper over these flaws with narration, but it also gives us the most uninteresting aspect where you must choose between two words on a diverging path. None of these moments ever draw you in.
Notice how none of this sounds all that scary in any sense of the word? That is because the game never gets to many of its supposedly scarier aspects until after you go through various wandering. Without giving anything away, the choices and different conclusions all feel largely unimportant. Most unfortunately, they never feel horrifying despite all the buildup to them. There are multiple extended puppet sequences that are not only much creepier in theory than in execution, but actually undercut the dramatic revelations. While certainly easier to put together on such a small scale, these scenes are undone by how poorly they dump in an excess of exposition towards the conclusion. It leaves most of the other elements of the story to fall by the wayside, making for a thoroughly satisfying final sequence of events.
It all ends up feeling like a lot of anticipation for a lot of nothing. It is a game that drew you in with the terror to be found in the blunt, violent aspects. However, it never put in the work to actually build a complete game around it that understands the nuances of fear. To create genuine terror in the player takes patience and good story development, not just bloody sequences thrown in occasionally. There are many games that have managed to do this well and create a horror legacy for themselves that stands the test of time. This is not going to be one of them. The only legacy forMartha Is Deadwill be to remind us that games ought to invest more in both their stories and gameplay as opposed to coasting off a few shocking elements.
