The Haunted Hoard: Martha is Dead (PS5)

When a mystery claims nothing is as it seems, that is meant to invite curiosity and intrigue, not be a very literal statement on the story’s contents. There needs to be some understandings of the world for the twists to take root in or else they would lose their impact since they can’t be tied back to concrete information you’ve uncovered. In the first-person narrative adventure game Martha is Dead though, it seems the creators cared more about the player’s reaction to repeatedly breaking those concrete details for the emotional reaction, a player who tries to make sense of what they’ve been shown at the end left grasping for straws as it feels like so much you’ve learned invalidates everything you had taken for granted.

Things don’t start so confusing in Martha is Dead though and actually take a few hours to reach that point. I won’t reveal what exactly is false or not in the way the plot is presented, but for the sake of summary we’ll be talking about the early shape of the story before it starts peeling back the layers to reveal its falsehoods. Martha is Dead has you playing as Giulia, a young woman who lives with her family in Italy during World War II. The daughter of a German general, the war is a vital backdrop for the tale being told that pushes it in different directions, but it is ultimately the personal tale of Giulia that truly begins when she spots her deaf twin sister Martha dead in the nearby lake. While bringing her sister’s body to shore, her mother approaches her, mistaking Giulia for Martha, and due to their mother always treating Martha far nicer, Giulia elects in that moment to try and continue her life as Martha instead.

Martha is Dead is off to a very effective start with this opening and even knows how to build upon both the emotional strife of the situation and the horror of assuming another person’s life in such a way. Giulia is racked with guilt, but also starts to understand her family and even her sister better from this new perspective. She has to work to keep up the ruse as her sister’s funeral arrangements are made in her name, but Giulia also isn’t content to just let Martha’s death be an unsolved mystery. A supernatural tale surrounds the lake of a White Lady who pulls young women into its depths to drown them, and with other unusual sights in the area, Giulia is left unsure if she can unravel the mystery with more logical means or if she might need to lean into the paranormal to try and get to the truth. Martha is Dead even starts seeding interesting new details as you learn a bit more about things surrounding the family, Giulia’s boyfriend a revolutionary fighting against the Germans and one of the few split paths in this otherwise straightforward story is whether you use that detail to help his allies or seek guidance from your guilt-ridden father. Sadly, some of the split path details don’t always get represented properly in the plot, the game seeming to occasionally forget your choice and just present what it pleases.

For the early hours of the game, much of what you will do will take place around your family’s villa, it often presented in bright sunlight as the game can create some beautiful or effective sights at times. However, when it begins to dip into horror, it does not do so lightly. Beyond the hint of the supernatural that leads to eerie sights and unusual dreams, Giulia’s guilt and her work to hide her real identity take you down some incredibly dark paths, the game’s first clue it cares most about your emotional reactions most of all being the positively grisly acts that firmly cement this as a horror game. In fact, there were moments I was worried I’d be unable to watch was going on, although often the threat of the gore was more unsettling than the game’s ability to render it. Martha is Dead is actually somewhat censored on PlayStation 4 and 5, removing the interactive side of some gruesome acts and turning them into cutscenes you can skip if needed, and they do feel a bit gratuitous even in their current form. Meant to shock most of all, they’re not without meaning or purpose, but it feels like Martha is Dead is most invested in bringing up talking points, much of the online discussion I find of the game referring to its face peeling scene even though that’s not even the worst it shows.

The horror is often relegated to those extreme moments of grisly acts or the brushes against paranormal, although things do take on a more psychological side the deeper into the tale you get and that is one reason facts start feeling unreliable in its story. However, before then, it does feel like most of what you do will be investigative and pretty laidback. There is a camera you acquire where you take pictures of important things or utilize different lenses and films to uncover hidden details, and poking around the villa and nearby areas actually gives you a lot of ground to cover. There’s a curious level of half-verisimilitude at play; the camera is an old-fashioned film one from the 40s so you need to tinker with it a good bit to get pictures in focus, you then head and develop those shots in the dark room, and there’s even a section where you can find yourself interpreting telegraph code by way of receiving and sending morse code messages. The reason I call it half-verisimilitude though is the game even comes right out and says it’s skipping steps in setting up the camera and film development for the sake of brevity, and considering how often they’re used it was the right decision as it is already a fair bit tedious as featured. It could have been more immersive to make the camera use more difficult, but there is a good degree of optional content that would then become excruciating to pursue if it was taken even further from its already fairly slow shape. Unfortunately, the game runs very poorly, my estimation of it already plummeting before any story revelations thanks to constant crashing. The autosave system tries to be accommodating but the game’s slow pace means you’ll want to maybe make manual saves just after traversing the estate for fear of another impending crash, and those weak side quests don’t feel worth pursuing when you’ll be doing something rather bland that will probably be peppered with needing to do it again and again after the game crashes once more.

As you start to push towards the facts on what happened to Martha though, things start to unwind in a big way. Previously clear details of the situation, ones the game might have even put in effort to show you are true, begin to get invalidated as Martha is Dead’s narrative is peeled away again and again until you’re left not really able to put its pieces back together. Certain elements hinge on the truth of others but the plot seems to pull pieces out without much thought on how it influences the whole, and what’s worse, even as it begins to send you spiraling in search of some true rigid facts, it starts adding in elements that you can no longer trust the veracity of. The game even whips out an intriguing story-telling device by way of a puppet show mirroring real world events you have some control over, this seemingly contain vital clues and revelations although it is somewhat hampered by that half-verisimilitude approach. The puppet show has complicated visual elements far too advanced for how it is presented, but while you might want to brush that away as artistic license, then the performer also has to make all the sound effects and voices themselves and the onomatopoeia choices can undermine otherwise key dramatic and morbid reveals that become outright comedic for it. The game even keeps leaning into its ludicrous extremes, but they now lack narrative weight as you can’t even trust what seems to be a vital revelation since even the twists and swerves will quickly have their revelations undone or altered in seemingly incompatible ways.

Many a horror game likes to leave open ambiguous questions for the sake of interpretation and discussion, but Martha is Dead’s messy hackjob of a narrative discards so much that attempts to do so leave you tripping over falsehoods. You could get a very lean and unsatisfying interpretation by plucking out things it seems to want you to believe, but overall, it might have been more satisfying to say it was all a dream since then at least you can lump it all into a bag of falsehood and then start prodding points for their potential metaphorical meaning. In my efforts to interpret what we are left with though, I almost ended up going down the road that this might be some deconstruction of the idea that fiction can have concrete details at all, but the game made no effort to foreshadow or present that idea and that concept would have needed more time to iterate on for it to truly be the message. However, I may have at least gleaned the intent behind the sloppy sequence of contradictory and unsatisfying reveals, and that is they aren’t there for the sake of making a cohesive story. This is narrative horror where were are being made to watch a perfectly fine plot be butchered before our eyes, Martha is Dead already reveling in its moments of sudden shocking violence and now turning that back on the story as it cares more about your emotional reaction to such unexpected revelations over how they can hold together. There is certainly a psychological angle to the unreliable truths that is meant for you to pick up, but the hunger for twists was so strong it left little for the players to feed on, the story ultimately hollow as it tossed aside an unnerving personal narrative in pursuit of confusing moments meant to make you gasp rather than grasp what it’s trying to say.

THE VERDICT: Martha is Dead starts off doing a decent job of contrasting its moments of beautiful regularity with the darker unsettling moments as a manifestation of the psychological toll of the leading lady trying to assume her dead sister’s life, but while it had an intriguing mystery to carry it, everything is sacrificed on the altar of shock value in the end. While you might initially get tripped up by game crashes forcing repeats of tepid and mundane interactions, you’ll find the back end of the story rips so much of its effective narrative elements to shreds that there’s nothing left to appreciate, the otherwise rare violent moments meant to make you recoil losing some of their punch when the purpose of what you’re seeing is tossed into the air and scrambled into a mess not worth the mental effort to untangle.

And so, I give Martha is Dead for PlayStation 5…

An ATROCIOUS rating. Stop playing Martha is Dead at a certain point, and you might wonder how the game could sink so low. The shocking gore feels like it might at least have a purpose in unsettling the player then, the story seems to have a direction and it even has twists already and secrets to uncover so it’s not like the plot was empty of intrigue before it went off the deep end. However, once you hit the point of no return, you’re left with some artistic visuals at times but they too just keep smashing apart what the story has worked to make you understand. How can you empathize with a story where you can’t even be sure seemingly key details revealed to you in dedicated scenes are meant to be taken seriously? Everything loses its weight as purpose is stripped from the presentation in favor of going down the road of shocking twists meant to surprise you rather than deepen the narrative. If the story was an ugly mess but the game was at least fun to play then maybe you could latch onto something, but the investigative elements and interactions feel like they were trying to have a foot in reality which means most of your interactions beyond some dull guesswork dream sequences where you run into words will be doing slow everyday tasks. A game shouldn’t be defined solely by its ending, but Martha is Dead does start tearing itself apart before then too, and revelations that invalidate so much of what was working without leaving you much else to consider or ruminate on do leave a sour taste in your mouth. Attempts to be charitable to some graphic sights dissolve with the rest of your desire to take this game seriously as Martha is Dead exposes itself as fodder for surprises rather than something with a compelling vision or creative story-telling approach.

Martha is Dead tumbles off the deep end and hopes you’ll be fine with that despite being an experience so dependent on its story to work. Already a bit messy thanks to the constant crashing, you crawl to the finale only to see it discarding things that worked, and the plot feels hollow as you try to make sense of elements that no longer feel meaningful since it all might as well be made up. A quick uncreative finale would have at least tied things together better than what we did get, but horror is often an emotion-heavy genre, so Martha is Dead leaned into that over all else and hopes you forget to reflect on the mess it left behind as it shifted its full devotion to surprises over substance.