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To me, it walked the line of not feeling too simple, but also not feeling forced or tedious as some games from Quantic Dream or Telltale Games can occasionally feel. Interactions with most objects aren’t as in-depth as those examples, but certain situations do require additional button prompts or the dragging of your mouse to complete. There’s a related whole process just to develop your pictures in a dark room, which simplifies the real process down time-wise but does still make you go through most of the motions of how you would develop it in real life. It’s not as simple as a point-and-click style horror game, and some actions (such as the camera) do err on the realistic side. You’re given a lot of freedom to explore the area, you have a bag for adding and holding items in your inventory, and a camera that you have to set up and apply focus and exposure for. The crux of the gameplay can be boiled down to walking or running around and interacting with objects, but of course, there is a lot more to it than that. In Martha Is Dead, you control a young woman named Giulia through a first-person perspective. Now as much as I would like to begin raving about the visuals, I do want to talk about the gameplay first. However, this game definitely seems like it will meet its promise of creating an unsettling atmosphere like the developers and the marketing have stressed. I never felt that any of the disturbing parts were done for pure shock value, even one in particular that I’ve seen a lot of comments on. Just like the message at the start of the demo, I do think it’s important to relay that the game does feature some uncomfortable topics and scenes. Unsurprisingly, it left me tense, uncomfortable, charmed, disgusted, but most of all, curious.
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With a name like Martha Is Dead how could I not click on it? While I had missed a few of the trailers that have come out over the last few months, my intrigue for the game was reignited when I found out that a demo was going to be a part of Steam Next Fest! The setting and what little I knew about the plot had my attention, so I did the only sensible thing and played the demo at 2 AM. I first came to know about this game a little over a year ago, because I happened to see a trailer posted on YouTube.
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