She suspects her father knows, but doesn’t want to ruin the illusion for her mother.Ĭonfused? That’s only the prologue. In keeping with the ruse, she must act deaf and never speak, lest the guise fall apart. The reasoning, she explains in diary-entry-voiceover, is she wanted the adoration from her mother she never got. Giulia pulls the drowned Martha from the lake and, in a moment of panic, “becomes” Martha looking at the dead Giulia. Martha, her deaf/mute twin sister favoured by the mother, drowns in the same lake of the fable above. Nearing the end of World War II, we’re put in the shoes of an older Giulia in her family villa in via per Cerbaia, Italy. Skip forward a few years, to summer 1944. A morbid tale of love and loss, it culminates in the myth of the Lady’s ghost hanging on. Rather than a quaint bedtime story, nanny is telling young Giulia (pronounced Julia) about The Lady In The Lake. An old lady is telling a young girl a story in bed, but this one’s a bit weirder (even by Tim Burton’s standards).

Our story starts in a similar style to Edward Scissorhands. If you are sensitive to body horror, feel free to skip to the end to see the score. So, with that bait and hook set in, let’s expound on that, shall we?Ĭontent warning: there will be descriptions, and a screenshot or two, of several strong themes and mutilation. It also has a “controversial moment” that has potentially overshadowed whether the game is any good or not. What it does have, instead, is a broken family horror scenario interspersed with some very gross imagery in between.

The colours are bright, the views idyllic, and there aren’t any rescue missions for a brother marching through the scenery. It doesn’t have any of the above, being set in Italy, out of the way, during the summer of 1944.

Well, not that avenue of cliche, at least. Thankfully, Matha Is Dead isn’t that cliche. Trenches, the horrors of war, ghosts of the fallen… or at a push, Nazi zombies. If someone were to pitch a “first person horror set during World War II”, it’d be easy to assume what it’d involve. A psychological horror that does indeed have some shocking moments, does Martha Is Dead maintain that tone with its schizophrenic gameplay? The Finger Guns review:

Martha is dead ps5 review download