From the authors of The Town of Light, one of the very rare pearls of the Italian videogame industry, Martha is Dead a first-person psychological thriller, a very narrative walking simulator that takes you wherever you want, has been released for PC, Playstation and Xbox. him when he wants you inside a twisted and suspended story of mental discomfort and fear. We are in Tuscany, in San Casciano, in 1944, at the end of the Second World War. The historical context is reconstructed as gracefully as the respect for the game of genre. It lingers a little too much in the macabre so as to be disturbing at times in some scenes. At least that’s how they thought of the Playstation that asked the development team to modify some situations of the game that we remember is forbidden to minors under 18. It is not censorship, explained Luca Dalcò, founder, game designer and author of the story of Marta is Dead,
The cuts and changes of Playstation
However, some changes have been made: interactivity has been removed from two scenes considered particularly rough. And in the finale, references to sexual practices have been deleted. This last blow of rubber is perhaps the most serious, admitted Dalcò, adding however that the user can play the whole experience without losing the sense of the work (the video of the interview with Luca Dalcò on Info Data). The publisher Wired Productions and the development studio had some problems, which in a very short time had to make the changes that, remember, you will not find in the Xbox and PC versions.
What we liked.
There is a thread that binds The Town of light, the story about the truth of the Volterra asylum in 2016 and this new horror experience. The suffering of mental illness is represented and explored with the tools of the grammar of the videogame and those of the cinema. The experiment was also successful thanks to an excellent care in computer graphics that makes the settings realistic and credible. Also thanks to Lka’s documentary research which carefully reconstructs the context of those years through newspapers, places and small and great details.
What we didn’t like.
We are talking about authored, story-driven video games that focus almost everything on the plot. The gameplay won’t surprise you, to be more explicit. Paradoxically, the real problem of these productions that struggle to accept compromises with what the current commercial video game market is asking for is the development time. The Lka team is made up of 10 people and it took them six years. Too long, Dalcò himself admitted. Surely to increase the “biodiversity” of an industry like that of the videogame a little stuck on its legs in its attempt to explore more adult genres and themes.
