Martha Is Dead on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Martha Is Dead is a dark first-person psychological thriller, set in 1944 Italy, that blurs the lines between reality, superstition and the tragedy of war.
Martha Is Dead is a psychological horror, story rich and psychological game
developed by LKA
and published by Wired Productions.
Released on February 24th 2022 is available only on Windows
in 13 languages: English, Italian, French, German, Spanish - Spain, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian, Korean, Polish, Traditional Chinese and Turkish.
It has received 3,078 reviews of which 2,464 were positive and 614 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.7 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 29.99€ on Steam, but you can find it for 6.90€ on Instant Gaming.
The Steam community has classified Martha Is Dead into these genres:
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64bit
- Processor: Intel Core i5 or equivalent AMD
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GTX 670 or AMD R9 270X
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 30 GB available space
- Additional Notes: Game installed on SSD Recommended
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
This game isn't hard or scary in the traditional sense. The gore isn't scary. But the entire thing, is still quite disturbing and menacing. From the background soundscape, to the eerie environment set against the beginning of WW2, to our unreliable narrator. The game is an easy play if you're a casual gamer. Puzzles are pretty simple. Not much for jump scares. Just a lot of point and click and walking around. The story though could be quite triggering. Even if you aren't normally triggered by content that touches on mental illness, miscarriage, war etc... this one is done in such a personable way. I wouldn't suggest anyone currently pregnant play the game, I am glad I didn't when it first came out because I was. The game also includes self harm. I had tried watching this game online to see if I'd be interested, and it seemed boring. It's a different experience when you're actually playing it. One piece of advice, try to do your side quests and achievements during chapters that have daylight, and before the last chapter of the game. I didn't realise I was at the end and had to cram in a bunch in the dark, it wasn't easy!
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This game is beautiful. It's heartbreaking, gorgeous, will have you crying, and will have you smiling. It's gut wrenching and twisted but beautiful. The story is painfully brutal and sad, but it gives you the time to really enjoy it. As someone who cannot handle jumpscares, this game was amazing in that the horror aspect was in the atmosphere. The multiple story lines offer a unique experience and it paces itself nicely. Overall I cannot recommend this game enough.
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‘Martha is Dead’ is a game created by LKA Studios (authors of the excellent ‘Town of Light’) and was released in February 2022. It tells the story of Giulia K., a young girl who is trying to find out who killed her twin sister Martha. The game is 7/8 hours long and the plot is truly intriguing from the start as we quickly realize that something’s wrong here. Really, really wrong. The game is a walking simulator in a semi-open world: we’re playing as Giulia (in FPP view) and we’re spending most of the time at exploring and looking for objects that are crucial to the story. We can also gather additional informations about some events or characters by reading notes and newspapers and sometimes we have to take photos of certain things to advance the plot. Gameplay-wise it’s just a typical walking-sim, so if you have played games like ‘Firewatch’ or ‘The Vanishing of Ethan Carter’ you know what to expect. There are also few QTE in the game, but they are very simple and almost impossible to fail, so they are not annoying. The in-game world is quite large (list of locations includes the house, the forest, the lake and several other interesting and sometimes also quite surprising places), but navigating through it is easy, because Giulia has access to the map and her diary, so we always know where we are and what to do next. It’s also worth mentioning that there are few optional side-quests available. They allow us to get a better understanding of certain events, but we also can completely ignore them and focus just on the main plot - it’s totally up to us. The game is set at the Italian countryside during World War II and the protagonist is a daughter of an Italian woman and a Nazi general. This alone gives quite an unusual (and basically unseen in video games) perspective, but there’s more - as it turns out, Giulia seemingly has absolutely no idea that Italian fascist and the Nazis are the bad guys (!) and she’s genuinly surprised that partisans are constantly fighting the Axis armies. Developers did a really good job here showing not only the girl's different (and ridiculous) perspective, but also how blind to the facts she is, because there’s enough evidence lying around to know what Mussolini’s and Hitler’s people really do. This whole thing is basically a detail always subtly appearing somewhere in the background and it’s really easy to miss if we’re not exploring carefully enough, but it is really well done. And now it's time to talk about the best thing about ‘Martha is Dead’ - absolutely fantastic story. I'll write it right away to make it clear – this is NOT a normal story about solving Martha's murder. The plot is really dark, heavy and reaches into the deepest, darkest parts of our minds making us wonder what's real and what's not. We’ll witness a lot of strong and very violent scenes (and I woudn’t be surprised if some people call them shocking or disgusting), but all of them make sense and are justified by the story the developers are telling. The story that at some point turns into the absolutely fascinating and messed up journey that keeps us hooked to the screen the entire time and does not disappoint at the end of the game. On top of that devs treat us like adults, so there is not just one simple explanation to everything and we should pay attention to details as some of them can totally change the way we’re understanding some events. Moreover, the atmosphere throughout the entire gameplay is simply incredible, because developers are revealing next layers of the story in very smart way and we know something unexpected is going to happen sooner or later. There’s also one thing that should be mentioned: even though the game is not a horror, it has some jump-scares in it. There are literally few of them, but I know some people hate them, so I think it should be mentioned. As for the technical stuff – ‘Martha is Dead’ looks stunning, especially on the ultra graphic settings: the textures are razor sharp, the lights and shadows work just like they should and some of the views are simply gorgeous. It’s basically one of those games where we can just go from place to place and spend hours taking screenshot after screenshot. The same thing can be said about the soundtrack as the music is simply phenomenal and complements what we see on the screen in an incredible way. I played the game with the Italian voice acting (it’s really solid) and English subtitles and I think it’s the best way to do it, but English voice acting is available as well (can’t say anything about its quality though). And it’s also worth mentioning that we can save game anytime we want plus there’s also an autosave feature. Now the complains and luckily the list is not long. First and foremost - ‘Martha is Dead’ was released 2,5 years ago and the technical state of the game is still.... Well, disastrous. Regardless of the graphic settings and DirectX version (we can choose between DX11 or DX12) I was experiencing constant stuttering, freezes, FPS drops, texture pop-ups and a whole bunch of other problems, such as camera jumps, crashes or the fact that sometimes after closing the game it turned out that I have to manually kill the process in the task manager because it was still running in the background. I have really decent PC that allows me to comfortably play games like ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ or ‘Elden Ring’, so it's not a hardware problem on my end and there’s a lot of topics about it on the Steam forums and it’s constantly mentioned here in the reviews. It’s kind of surprising to be honest, because previous LKA game (‘Town of Light’) worked like a charm and I had no technical issues with it whatsoever. Obviously I know every game is different, but I just didn’t expect that ‘Martha is Dead’ could be THAT messed up technically. Apart from that I can complain about literally two little things. First – sometimes during the exploration ambient music just stops and restarts only after saving and reloading the game. Not a big deal, but still an issue. Second – backtracking is a little bit annoying sometimes. Developers seem to be aware of it, because there’s a bike available in the game, but because of the technical problems I described earlier it becomes completely useless, mostly due to the sudden camera jumps as they make it impossible to drive straight even just a few meters. To sum up this review – ‘Martha is Dead’ is really a great game. Dark, thought-provoking, incredibly intriguing and sometimes simply fascinating. And yes, it’s a mess on the technical side, but in my opinion the story makes up for everything. Give it a shot, I’m pretty sure you won’t regret it. ----- TL;DR? Here's the short version. Pros: + Fascinating story with many unexpected twists + Creepy and disturbing atmosphere + Graphics are absolutely stunning + Beautiful soundtrack and really solid voice acting + Manual saving system (and there's also autosaving feature) Cons: - Constant stuttering and framedrops - Random freezing and crashes - Backtracking can be kind of annoying It's a great game with a lot of technical problems, but the story IMHO makes up for everything. Is it worth giving a shot? Totally.
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This is not a game meant for everyone. If you are a fan of The Town of Light you will likely enjoy this entry. Something I enjoyed about both games is the way in which it depicts and explores mental illness. It is not taken lightly, and the game designers clearly have a deep empathy for people who endure mental health issues. Game play is limited, but given the nature of the game itself this is not an issue. They do a good job of exploiting the medium to tell an effective story. There were some elements that I found needlessly complicated, but these are optional. Taken as a whole everything serves to move the story forward, or immerse you in the narrative until you feel as one with the protagonist. The last part is crucial for me. I haven't felt like this since I first saw the film Session 9. The way in which the narrative unfolds leaves you questioning what exactly happened until the very end. The denouement is touching and a great send off. Performance wise I feel like this could have been optimized a little better. For being a limited narrative experience it really made my computer chug at times. There were some texture loading anomalies, and some inconsistent pop-in. Nothing super extreme, but it's worth mentioning. 8/10 would strongly recommend. Definitely play it alongside Town of Light as they link together in a sort of meta-narrative.
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Martha Is Dead is an absolutely remarkable psychological thriller. If you appreciate games with complex unravelling narratives and strong emotional content, you will probably really enjoy this game. It is set in Italy in 1944. You are Giulia, a young woman. Your twin sister Martha is deaf. Your father is a German general overseeing the war in Italy. Your Italian mother despises you. She adores Martha but has been profoundly abusive to you throughout your life. Your father did love you and try to protect you from your mother, but he was increasingly absent because of the war. It begins as you are gathering film in the forest near the lake. You had set up cameras on timers and want to develop the photos. As you are focusing one of the cameras, you realise that there is a body in the water. You frantically swim to it. It is Martha. You drag her to shore and just sit with your dead twin. Impulsively you remove her locket and place it around your neck. Your parents find the two of you. But they believe that it is Giulia who has drowned. It is at that moment that you decide to live as Martha. It's one of the best narrative hooks that I've ever encountered in a game. As you live as Martha, you begin investigating her death. Giulia knows that she's psychologically damaged and is working to overcome that. She wants to know that truth. What unfolds is a series of revelations, some of which are very powerful. The game has some really strong moments andI don't think that I'll forget it. This is an excellent game. If you love a strong narrative and powerful emotions, then play it. At the beginning of the game, you are in the beautiful Italian countryside. You had set up cameras on timers and you
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Last Updates| Steam data | 07 April 2025 14:15 |
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| SteamSpy data | 10 April 2025 01:21 |
| Steam price | 15 April 2025 04:44 |
| Steam reviews | 14 April 2025 05:56 |
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Online players
7
Developer
LKA
Publisher
Wired Productions
Release
24 Feb 2022
Platforms
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