Martha Is Dead review – why did you say that name?

metro.co.uk:

A gothic psychological horror game that is wilfully uncommercial, yet thought-provoking and chilling – with or without the cuts.

Some games are clearly designed to become money-making machines, by appealing to as large a slice of the gaming public as possible (at the cynical end of the spectrum, sometimes taking things even further via the likes of lootboxes). Martha Is Dead takes the absolute polar opposite approach, to such an extent that debate will no doubt rage as to whether it can even be classed as a game. But if you approach it with a completely open mind – a big if, certainly – you will find an experience which is utterly unique, even if it’s also heavily flawed.

Martha Is Dead could be loosely categorised as a psychological horror game – it’s certainly chilling at times (although you shouldn’t expect conventional jump scares) and very, very dark indeed. But calling it a horror game doesn’t really do it justice. Instead, to employ some descriptive precision, it’s a winding, gothic yarn wrapped around a forensic study of the madness that takes place inside a teenage girl’s head.

Martha Is Dead is set in surroundings that initially appear to be idyllic: a large, rural farmhouse with a nearby lake. The setting is Italy in 1944, as the Allied invasion force sweep rapidly northwards, eliminating the remnants of Mussolini’s troops and the sizeable German presence in the country. You play as Giulia, a troubled teenage girl. The game kicks off with Giulia revisiting a childhood memory of a dark folktale her nanny used to tell her, about an undead woman in white who haunts a lake, occasionally preying on young girls who visit the shore.

Obsessed with photography, Giulia goes down to the lake, where she has set up various