Last night I started Martha is Dead, streaming some of it on BEAM. Today, I had a feeling that it wasn't the best sort of game to stream, due to the subject matter: Mental health.
Today I finished it, and I have to say that I am glad I didn't stream the rest. It covered some horrific issues and didn't shy away from any of them.
Martha is Dead is a walking simulator with some simple exploration puzzles, but nothing that proves too difficult.
Everything in the game is designed to push the… See More
story forward, allowing you to make certain choices (most of which still push you into the direction of the main plot) that range from the banal chores of everyday life, to the gruesome triggering horror that seems all the more disturbing because it's based around the mental health of the main character.
After you find your twin sister Martha dead in a local lake you are taken on a trip in a stunning Italian landscape in the grip of World War II. Your family tries to carry on as the world around falls apart and as you progress through the story you get hit with one shocking twist after another.
I thought I had the story figured out pretty quickly, but as is the case with well-told tales, I was wrong. The darkest thoughts in my head - the ones that should never see the light of day - are what this tale is about. The taboo of a person's mental health deteriorating at a drastic pace, when it was probably never great to begin with.
I've played a lot of harrowing tales, but this is only the second time that I felt horrified at the things that can happen to people (the first being another Italian game called The Town of Light) when they really have nowhere to turn for help.
All of this torment is covered with a veneer of a stunningly realised rural Italy, with a soundtrack and environmental audio to match. Walking in the woods, you could close your eyes and swear you were there. Walking through their rustic home, you can hear clocks in another room and floorboards creaking as your weight bears down on them.
Little touches like realistic fabric physics on your character's clothes are something you rarely see, but if you look at her shadow whilst walking, you can see the flow of the material. There is so much love poured into this game.
But there is one caveat to all this.
There are performance issues galore in Martha is Dead. The longer you play, the worse they get, leading me to think there are memory bleed issues (and I had one crash with an error code that said as much). The odd thing is that whilst in the dense woodlands, the frame-rate was better than inside the house.
If you can persevere, it's a tale worth being part of.
Another word of warning though. There are scenes of graphic self-harm and stuff that is much darker, so if you are in a fragile state of mind, you may find it hard to stomach.
If you are okay with that, and the performance drops, I'd say give it a go. It's not happy, but it's a story that has a lot of heart and hard work behind it.
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