36 Martha Is Dead PC
Photography becomes gruesome in LKA’s historical horror
Developer/publisher | LKA
Format | PC
Origin | Italy
Release | TBA
Set in Italy during the Second World War, firstperson horror story Martha Is Dead is about lifting the skin in more ways than one. As it begins, the title character is taking photographs of a lake near her home, the real-life town of San Casciano in Val di Pesa, when she stumbles on the floating body of her sister Julia. Martha dreams of her terrible discovery throughout the game: in one such vision, she carves off the dead girl’s face and drapes it across her own, such that you are made to look through the eyes of both sisters at once. Staged with jarring lack of fuss, the scene reflects not just Martha’s guilt at surviving Julia, but a kind of violence intrinsic to the otherwise-familiar modelling techniques that bring the game’s wartime Italy to life.
Developed by LKA – otherwise known for psychological drama The Town Of Light, which was set in a real-world abandoned asylum – Martha Is Dead makes extensive use of photogrammetry, the process of recreating objects by photographing them from different angles and wrapping the images around a mesh. Popular among developers who can’t afford huge art teams, photogrammetry can be likened to taxidermy. It is about slicing away the surface of an object and stitching the pieces back together. Or at least, so we find ourselves thinking after witnessing Martha’s bloody defacing of her sister, whose flayed cheekbones are rendered with the same care as the other items we encounter in our demo: delicate toy horses, a lustrous hardback storybook and a looping gilt frame that seems to writhe in the candlelight.
The vaguely cadaverous aspect of these exquisitely captured artefacts is heightened by the game’s inviting you to play photographer in turn – to explore photography as a kind of body horror, carving away pieces of reality for consideration and recombination. Martha’s camera is one of the game’s key puzzle-solving props: you use it to collect evidence as you tackle the riddle of Julia’s death, developing the images later in a darkroom. The camera itself is a delight to manipulate, and while this isn’t an exact simulation, there’s an enticing element of craft involved: expose the film for too long when taking photographs and you’ll ruin them.
Julia’s death itself appears to be a recreation, mirroring that of a woman whose spirit is said to haunt the lake. LKA hopes to keep players guessing about whether the game’s stranger moments are of supernatural origin or manifestations of the character’s anguish. Some of Martha’s dreams recall the likes of Red Candle’s Devotion: one sees you hurrying through a forest, choosing between left or right turns in order to combine words into a sentence, as though racing across a gigantic ouija board. If this is a ghost story, however, it is one rooted in the language of the everyday, albeit an ‘everyday’ haunted by passing bomber formations. “The radio and the newspaper will tell you part of the story, what’s happening around you in the game,” creative director Luca Dalcò tells us. Photography aside, you will ride bicycles, play the piano and leaf through a journal of Martha’s thoughts and speculations.
In channelling the paranormal, LKA has granted itself more artistic leeway than was possible with its previous game. “In The Town Of Light, I knew that I must pay a lot of attention to the recreation, whereas this time the story is more fictional,” Dalcò continues. “I feel more free to represent the psychological aspects in a horrific way.” The developers will need to be careful nonetheless in their portrayal of mental health – trauma in fiction is too often cheapened for being reimagined as some kind of phantasm, and The Town Of Light sometimes felt gratuitous in its representation of a woman’s suffering. Such caveats aside, LKA is onto something fascinating with Martha Is Dead. Many are the horror games that conjure up a forgotten time and place in the service of the macabre. This is one of the few that suggests that the act of restoration might be macabre in itself.
In one vision, she carves off the dead girl’s face and drapes it across her own