They make you SLICE OFF your SISTER'S FACE and WEAR IT?? | Martha is Dead Review

[@cyber_runner]

"I realized my mother was an interactable object so I went to go speak to her." *pulls out a fucking handgun* JESUS WTF

[@spinshocker]

You know, the plot line of a twin being involved in the death/disappearance of their sibling, and subsequently taking up the dead/missing twin’s identity while privately dealing with the guilt associated with this event, was done much less gratuitously and offensively in Gravity Falls.

[@MertKayKay]

Gravity Falls always sets the best examples 😍

[@billciphergirl6049]

@@MertKayKay Agreed

[@ddjsoyenby]

yeah that show was amazing.

[@cyber_runner]

Bro fr

[@toolatetothestory]

@@KrissyBlues Eh? Who? Can't remember it showing up in the first five games...

[@isenokami7810]

The Martha reveal ticked me off. It was basically, “I was abused, but I found a stupid way to stop the abuse. But that just shoved the abuse on you, so somehow I deserve to die.” Part of my anger is that it’s stupid, but also that I can get rather vindictive toward fictional villains. Simply put, in my opinion, someone did indeed deserve to die: that f$&@ing abusive mother. Stupid as Martha’s plan was, I really wish the end goal was, instead of tricking her own mother into killing her, luring her mother into the lake to kill HER. That b$&@& had no business being a parent. Edit: okay, story is more complicated and stupid than I expected, I take the mother hatred back. Mainly because I have no idea what’s going on anymore.

[@vfxninja5503]

Don't worry, nothing actually happened. The plot literally goes 'so, uh, wtf was all that about' towards the end, so we can just assume the mom was evil because it's the most comfortable option. Or, if she's nice, then the 'killing mom' scene didn't happen. Hell, none of the game happened and Marthulia was just napping in a field somewhere.

[@MelonTartVA]

And then they drop the “I am Martha, Giulia isn’t real. She’s a splitbl personality I made to deal a with abuse.”

[@simly5189]

"Mainly because I have no idea what's going on anymore" really just sums this whole thing up. You know you've botched your story when the audience's vitriolic hatred towards the abuser fizzles out due to sheer confusion

[@zhnsheel]

Me at the start of the video: well the concept of a twin stealing her dead sister’s identity and being eaten by guilt is pretty cool how did they manage to mess it up Me a few minutes later: OH BOY

[@MertKayKay]

HAHA I feel that. Was such a cool idea!!

[@HiBuddyyyyyy]

They kind of did that in one story of a manga called Higurashi. It’s not really the same but it’s the same kind of thing with horror and twinanigans.

[@divineeye147]

yeah I wasn’t expecting to be angry at this game at the end of the video. shame that unique concept will remind me of this game

[@Bliss-l1t]

@@HiBuddyyyyyy I am happy someone else knows about higurashi. Honestly I don't know if it was because I was young reading it at the time or if it was actually done interestingly.

[@amobaleiasassassinas]

@@Bliss-l1t Higurashi is know as one of the best horror products in the manga/visual novel sphere. Sadly due to it's age, initial character design in the novel and convoluted plot it's not as well know now as other. Glad to see it's not forgotten

[@lock5227]

This game could have been fantastic if it was about living with the grief of losing a sibling and taking on their identity and what that comes with. They could have produced an interesting narrative but instead seemed to fall for quick "thrills" and relied heavily on stigma and holding up caricatures of an already highly stigmatized condition. It was an ultimately frustrating experience of what could have been a really interesting concept.

[@MertKayKay]

I couldn't agree with you more Lock - there were some really good threads here that just got pushed aside!

[@taka2721]

Oh damn, there were seeds for so better plot twist in this game. When we learn that Martha was not deaf and she was pregnant, it seemed clear to me that not Martha died in the lake, but Giulia, I mean, both of you can speak, and Martha was pregnant, but apparently Giulia had miscarriage. Death came for Giulia, both sisters claimed to be Martha, so it took one, and apparently guessed correctly. Maybe set it up as a point when Martha internalised being Giulia? Or maybe just say that Death came for Martha, and both claimed to be Giulia, but to try and fool Death they both needed to believe it? And make it so when you go to do "abortion" on your dead sister, you find nothing, and then you realize the truth. Idk, just seems like much better twist to me

[@ombra711]

Absolutely 100% spot on about the undercover lolicons blowing a gasket everytime Sony censors "those" type of games.

[@zhnsheel]

I’m just snickering at the “gang signs” joke here in the corner I’m so happy your suicide of Rachel Foster video got recommended to me and I decided to check it out. Would be a shame to miss out on such a good creator

[@MertKayKay]

Aww thank you Pinamal 😍😍 I appreciate it!!

[@lifegrain6092]

i suppose it's quite a big "gang", i notice an alarming amount of people openly performing such signs being that i am not a practitioner of the signs, it is quite the strange feeling when one is surrounded by what i can only describe as a "gathering" of people from apparently different gangs, each signs looking more like a dance routine than the last

[@CafeMatcha-js4oh]

​@@lifegrain6092theyre not gang signs it's actually a Christian gesture of a cross to show faith, gratitude, or protection. I come from a fairly religious mexican family so I grew up surrounded by this gesture.

[@yourresume373]

@@CafeMatcha-js4ohThat’s their point.

[@AskForDoodles]

@@CafeMatcha-js4oh r/woosh

[@KirbyIsCute]

The ending with talking to a doll version of yourself and agreeing to every theory you bring up is the equivalent of "I tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn't even matter."

[@Fuzzysea693]

This is so good.

[@littlemustacheemoticon]

Fun fact: Martha’s name is…pretty weird. I live in Italy and the most common Italian version of Martha is Marta. I don’t know if it was a particular trend of the time, or if one of their parents isn’t fully Italian, but I just wanted to share that it’s either a small mistake or there’s a deeper reason for it

[@MertKayKay]

Ah wow I had no idea! Thank you for that note. Now I'm wondering too

[@Vladimir_4757]

The lines in the game are read in Italian, and the name is pronounced Marta from my memory. I'll fire up the game tomorrow and update my comment if I'm wrong though

[@littlemustacheemoticon]

@@Vladimir_4757 it is pronounced Marta, but the spelling is wrong :P I was talking about that

[@Avellania]

Her dad is German and that's the German version of the name. I guess the twins have one German and one Italian name, that work in either language.

[@littlemustacheemoticon]

@@Avellania oh that makes sense!

[@CatClone1]

I thought it was gonna be an interesting take on the childe ballad "Twa Sisters", from a sister getting drowned by her sibling, to a young man that one of the sisters has a relationship with, to the early theme of murdering out of jealously, to the ongoing art motif.... It looked like it was gonna be a cool adaption! Then they made a strong left into the edgiest most ablest route. Its like the writers got spooked about concept of the story being too fantastical and pulled out the classical "the protagonist is crazy!" Bailout revision.

[@MertKayKay]

Absolutely see what you mean Cabbage. I was absolutely entranced by this game at first! Really interesting story seeds that just come to nothing because they either wanted to fill it with 'twists' or are the kind of writers that resent their players being able to figure out the ending, so just go ridiculously off the wall with it

[@SlowestGuyy]

Fun fact: here in Italy the unlucky number is 17, not 13, so they got even that wrong

[@thewriter1008]

Sorry to respond on a year-old comment, but my autism feels the need to provide fun facts, and I've played way too much Persona not to have absorbed some knowledge about tarot symbolism. It's probably related to the Tarot theming, where 13 is the Death card. Except that's also botched, because even though it's numbered 13, it's actually the 14th because 0 is The Fool and Death...kinda doesn't mean death. Everyone likes it because it's scary and ominous sounding, but it's actually not that bad in the grand scheme of things, it more or less just means change. Ironically, number 16 - and therefore the 17th card, ironically - is The Tower, which is one that means sudden, violent change, so that one IS pretty bad in most circumstances.

[@oroontheheels]

I personally liked the first (?) plot twist that Martha pretended to be disabled to avoid abuse (believable in my opinion) and that she suffered with guilt when Guilia became target for their mom abuse. I might be pretentious but I liked that Martha last will was to pretend to be Julia and scream insults at their abusive mother because Gulia never could do that. If it was the ending it would’ve been enough. And i think story would be coherent and tragic and even maybe good? But everything that came after that… whaaaaat??

[@lake8407]

I''ve come to this video after watching The Suicide of Rachel Foster. As both an English major and a fiction writer, i really enjoy your literary analysis. And, I have a game I am happy to recommend you. As someone who has had severe struggles with mental health, I have found genuine solace in and extreme respect for The Cat Lady. Yes it is graphic, but in a way that feels both deserved and earned, and my crying at the end felt again both deserved and earned, and also cathartic in a way both games you reviewed seem to be vehemently opposed to. While I would adore to see your take on that game, I also very much appreciate it as being a personal and effective tale that doesn't need a literary analysis to understand, but would nonetheless benefit from. Thank you for the work you put in!

[@MertKayKay]

Lake thank you! Many of my uni friends were English Lit students so perhaps their analytic skills rubbed off on me 😁 I've never heard of The Cat Lady! As far as I can see it's only on PC (I'm a schmuck PlayStation player) but I have made a genuine note of it and I will play it if I get an opportunity to. Thanks for the recommendation, I do definitely appreciate a graphic game when done well and I'm excited to see it

[@mayanah.2875]

Likewise! I too came from the video of Rachel foster and her clear breakdown of interesting components, the allusions and references to various books seemed like heaven to someone who loves books

[@Zanyotaku]

Oh my god The Cat Lady is by far one of my favorite horror indie games that does have dark subject matter but actually bothers to explore it in an interesting way. Even with the rest of the trilogy it'll always hold a very special place in my heart.

[@yui7star]

@@MertKayKay I can also absolutely can recommend it too! I too suffer from depression and the game really respects anyone going through those struggles.

[@heszedjim9699]

Oh man i forgot about the cat lady. It was so good.

[@Mecheres]

If you look at the game in the lens of "Giulia's twin died tragically, and she enters psychosis to an extreme degree to even succumbing to fabricating a narrative for HOW her sister died, to the point of not trusting even those closest to her and her own childhood memories perverting (lady of the lake bullshit)", it actually could have been a good story. It's a bit gratuitous and feels like a Pepe Sylvia board to actually explain my train of thought, but I feel like if the devs just went with the path of the whole "deaf and mute" schtick as simply a defense mechanism that Giulia manifests and somehow weaves into her own childhood as an excuse for her behavior it could have avoided the blatant ableism towards PTSD and DID. Instead, they wrote a character who is just... delusional. No excuse or reasoning for her behavior, or even a notable trigger for WHY Giulia entered psychosis; just plainly "she was always crazy". Like it's supposed to be a gotcha moment. Another thing I'd like to add; considering the narrative is just "girl got too silly", they could have easily shoehorned the explanation for all the letters written. Giulia wrote the ones from Marta because she was trying to convince herself and blah blah blah, and the boyfriend, Lapo, was real and they definitely slept together and the letter he was holding that clearly was in Giulia's handwriting is just a planted note to again, convince Giulia that everything her brain is trying to form to help her cope and understand her trauma is real. The letters are meant to be an admission to guilt in a way, because she knows it's not real and is struggling with her reality. I don't know, this game gives me a migraine.

[@MissingCollectible]

That vicious takedown at the end was amazing. This was a great video / review. Really appreciated the "this isn't what censorship is" part.

[@MertKayKay]

Aww Pete I'm so happy you liked it! I feel like I missed out so much stuff that I wanted to say - it's always how it goes isn't it

[@maddyrevenge]

There’s some level of irony to people getting outraged over people being “too sensitive” or that “PC culture has gone mad”, totally unaware that their reaction was specifically engineered, and the ease with which they can be provoked into a lather of outrage allowed them the perfect target for manipulation. Perhaps had they been less sensitive and more discerning they would have been able to recognise this and use their critical thinking skills to come to a more informed - and less reactionary - conclusion

[@MertKayKay]

Absolutely agree; knee-jerk reactions to false rumours of censorship are exactly what was anticipated by this company

[@heresyisecstasy]

I deal with severe, crippling mental health issues. Shit like this game is why I laugh whenever people say that the younger generations are fighting the stigma of mental health. We are not being normalized; we are being fetishized.

[@MertKayKay]

Absolutely true J M. To imply this game is even remotely trying to 'help', and then painting people with DID as literal time bombs who will murder everyone they love - how on earth is that going to help?

[@theredoctopus3196]

​@MertKayKay this shit video of yours clearly shows a lack of understanding. There is always two sides of a coin. I'm not saying traumatized people always become violent but extreme violence often stems from trauma. I too have been deeply traumatized and I too had more than enough moments in my life where I thought about brutally murdering some people. To suggest that these thoughts never exist with deeply traumatized people Is just silly. For a character like Martha (while on meth I might say ..look at the "meds" all of them take) to react that way and murder her mother is more than possible. I believe you Americans have a lack of nuanced thinking. You either think this game is showing how mentally ill people are dangerous or you cry like little dogs about how this offense.... instead of realizing this is actually realistic tho its not the norm. But I guess most of yall have never been in the position to actually feel this way. I understand that themes like these sell well and it's meant to be horror but to call it a fetishisation is just outlandish

[@heresyisecstasy]

@@theredoctopus3196 I have clinically diagnosed DID, the disorder "depicted" in the video game. I have no issue with mental illness being portrayed as including violent urges, because that is the truth of what we go through, but that is NOT what this video game was doing. This was a story meant to shock and titillate, and they threw in a mental disorder to justify it without even caring if they were portraying said disorder even remotely correctly (spoiler alert: it is not portrayed correctly, not even a little). This game was not made for and by mentally ill people struggling with trauma, daily living and violent urges; this was straight up trauma prn using my diagnosis as an excuse to put whatever they wanted on the screen for the entertainment of people that don't deal with these issues in the slightest and never will.

[@renoahsprings]

@@theredoctopus3196Brutally thinking about murdering someone is not a trauma response, it’s called intrusive thoughts, and it can happen to anyone. It is not uncommon. Everyone has thought about hurting someone when mad, it’s the actions you take afterwards that can be an action caused by trauma. Like lashing out after you had experienced something that causes you to react in a certain way in certain situations. Also Xenophobic much? You really had to add in your two cents for Americans not knowing how to critical think when you can’t even do so yourself.

[@theredoctopus3196]

@renoahsprings I can do so very well. I I said exactly what you pointed out in your first sentence and yes I added the criticism towards Americans because it's always Americans that get offended by these things. I've never seen a European or anyone else playing games like these and calling it a fetischization as much as Americans did. It's a well known critique most the world has towards the American culture currently. This way of being easily offended and promoting censorship

[@BexTheBoo388]

I was so intrigued by the premise, but once you said the mother finds out about the swap early on, I was confused as to what the rest of the story would be about. I was down for a game about the growing guilt and doing everything they can to pretend to be their sister. Maybe something like: Guilia digs so deep into her sister's life and past in an attempt to find out information on her to impersonate her better and finds out Martha was secretly some kind of spy, or a part of some sort of fucked up shit that Guilia now has to be a part of because she "is her". Maybe Lapo was cheating on Guilia with Martha and they can still be together, but with the knowledge that they were doing it behind Guilia's back? Just something other than twist on top of twist on top of twist that don't have any logical bearing.

[@daisyjohnson4837]

14:33 "steal from her purse too" is actually killing me

[@MertKayKay]

Hahaha the karma balances out. Go on, treat yourself

[@jaysonjackson3455]

Probably nothing in there worth anything though. She probably keeps her wallet on her or a locked drawer.

[@sillyd0g]

speaking as an identical twin, even just the core conceit of this game is completely ludicrous. the idea that a set of twins is so identical in every way that one of them can assume the other's identity and fool their own parents is fucking silly.

[@alljustletters]

pretty sure she's supposed to have dissociative identity disorder, which is caused by childhood trauma, but it's done really badly, as is usually the case in media. DID manifests as "split/multiple personalities" (that's an antiquated way to look at it, but it's what people are familiar with; more accurately it causes dissociation between parts of the self to the degree that they don't share some or any memories, and present with separate identities), but not psychosis. drugs could cause the psychotic symptooms but it's still harmful considering DID & psychosis are both consistently misrepresented in these harmful ways. i think some of the narrative sounds vaguely compelling, but the mental illness angle seems disrespectful at best.

[@MertKayKay]

Thank you for the explanation! I have a friend who is a psychologist and I quizzed him plenty about this game while I was writing the review and he just generally seemed so confused by what I was explaining to him 🤣 he also identified the childhood trauma link but overall just seemed baffled by the connections this game made, but I always assumed it was just because I wasn't getting it across to him well enough (and he had no interest in checking to verify after I mentioned the self harm scene) Like you said, it's disrespectful at best - especially considering they straight up claim to be "spreading awareness" of mental health at the end. The overused trope of DID -> Psychosis -> Amnesiac Murderer in media really needs to stop Thanks for watching Ghoul, I love your username

[@Vladimir_4757]

Unfortunatley the twin Martha is real. Town of Light, beginning of the game, green building. There are newspaper clippings bringing up Martha's death.

[@jadedoni6447]

the "obscure gang signs" joke admittedly made me laugh so hard

[@KatKit52]

So I like to play devil's advocate (not in the "defend Nazis" way, but in the "I wonder if this is what the writers were going for" way) when it comes to games like this. Also, while I may not be an English teacher, I was raised by two, so, unfortunately, I was raised in the art of (bullshit symbolism theorizing) knowing that the red means Giulia is on the rag. My first thought when it came to Giulia wanting her mother's love even though she has her father's love is that that is actually realistic. Many times, abused children will deliberately seek out the love and affection from the parent who abuses them. It's part of why it's so hard for abuse victims to escape their abusers, even if they have the unconditional love and support of others. It's almost like an addiction: the abuser's love gives the abuse victim a sort of "high" *because* the abuser does not always give that love. When the abuser takes the love away, the "lows" end up hurting even more, which then makes the "highs" even better when they next come around, and then the abuser takes the love away and the cycle continues. So, Giulia rejecting her father's steady, unconditional love in favor of her mother's unconditional, abusive love is unfortunately true to life. Further, it's always easier to want what someone else has. The grass is always greener on the other side, and all that. As for the dream sequences: basically, tldr this next paragraph, the word game bits ruin everything. The dream bits on the side of the lake could actually be very interesting portrayals of the game's events through Giulia's perspective, but they're ruined by the player having to literally spell out what the game is trying to tell you. First, where Giulia slices off Martha's face: I think that scene is a pretty good symbolic reading of the guilt Giulia feels. It's not really about the literal act of putting on her sister's face (as you said, they are identical), but rather that Giulia has stolen Martha's identity. She has committed an act of violence on Martha's personhood for her own selfish motives. It's more about Giulia stealing Martha's name, her place in the family, and her whole self, to be a replacement, and then leaving the unrecognizable corpse behind. The face is not just Giulia literally physically looking like Martha, the face symbolizes Giulia removing her sister's identity for herself. Further, you could also argue that it foreshadows the other switcheroo: where its Martha pretending to be Giulia to trick their mother, or that Martha never existed in the first place and was just Giulia "wearing Martha" as a mask. Second, the Lapo and Martha and Giulia bit: definitely foreshadowing the reveal that Lapo got Martha pregnant. They're laying down, holding hands, he's the only unrelated guy to Martha and Giulia (and the developers clearly wanted to portray the dad as 100% great, so he couldn't have done it), and then the ghost who is also Giulia who is also Martha kisses him. Yeah, Lapo's the baby daddy. And at the end... they really chose the worst two genres for lazy writers. Mysteries and heavily interpretative symbolism. If you want to write a good mystery, you need to know everything from the very beginning. Yes, there are times where a writer can be writing and then get inspired to take the idea in a different direction, but in that case, the writer is still taking things in a direction supported by the rest of the text. For something you want to be "open-ended" and "open to interpretation", you need to know what you, the author, think the ending is. Even if they leave in bits that allow for other interpretations, even if they never tell anyone else, the author *must know* how they interpret the end. If you don't know what you want to say and where you think it will go--and, even worse, *if you do not trust the audience to work out anything themselves*--it will be a bad story. The grim reaper puppet show was cool, but everything else is bullshit. The Nazi stuff gives us nothing, the ghost stuff gives us nothing, the tarot cards give us nothing, the pregnancy gives us nothing... We get nothing. The fact that the censored version removes the face scene, the abortion scene, and the hanging by your sister's body scene shows that those scenes are worth NOTHING.

[@MertKayKay]

"The red means Giulia is on the rag" a woman after my own heart, I love joking about being on the rag/the blob. I see what you mean about Giulia wanting the mother's love; I think that was one of the ingredients in the initial compelling story. And the poor father! But you're right, it does make sense. I've also heard of a "come close so I can hit you" phenomenon with abusive parents, where they seem to be changing and making an effort, just for you to lower your guard, get closer, and then get horribly burned in a way you wouldn't otherwise - perhaps Giulia was in the habit of taking whatever opportunity she could to get close, but was used to being burned? I like your opinion about the word game! I remember finding it very irritating (if you get one word wrong you have to completely restart), and, like you said, it just force-feeds you any possible subtext. The Lapo baby daddy symbolism also makes a ton of sense there; I always had a feeling Giulia was the White Lady (same voice actress), but before I knew Martha wasn't real I assumed Giulia kissed Lapo because she was coveting him. And YES the "open endedness" just screamed to me of "we have no idea how to wrap this up" rather than "fill in the blanks yourself". I've had a lot of people comment their own experiences with DID/BPD/dark thoughts and they pick apart the way this game absolutely insults their fundamental struggles, but, this game is also just so poorly written. Even without those forced injections of "mental health awareness", it's just a tragically written story - and not as intended. Thank you for the comment Katie, I was actually on a call with some friends and I brb'd them just so I could properly read and reply to this

[@Chellekathryn]

I think Julia was pregnant with her lovers baby but miscarried (we see that on the bed) and the fetus scene could potentially be about having 2 people inside one body (DID)

[@devilishmint4450]

I really love your critical teardowns of games that pretend to be deep and amazing but are actually shallow as hell! Keep it up :]

[@MertKayKay]

Thank you Devilish!! 🥰

[@joshuaowensjr8694]

U can love games it’s an opinion. Let’s not tear them doen

[@gwencere9383]

I hate the "split personality" twist so much, its so lazy and harmful to people with DID and so incredibly boring

[@MertKayKay]

Yeah the idea that someone with DID is going to just snap and murder people and ✨ forget ✨, like to claim you're "spreading awareness" is just cruel

[@nerdychocobo]

@@MertKayKay I'm not plural myself but I am neurodivergent and struggle with depression and that final message about "mental health matters uwu" after feeding into the demonisation of like,, every cluster-b personality disorder AND showing gratuitous self harm felt like a massive slap in the face. it would make me laugh if it didn't make me so enraged

[@yukiandkanamekuran]

Yeah I have a dissociative disorder. That twist is fucking out of left field, ableist and lazy.

[@swimmyswim417]

@@MertKayKay it doesn’t count as ‘spreading awareness’ if it’s not done with compassion and respect. Just a gimmick exploiting something real people deal with for cheap melodrama.

[@ddjsoyenby]

ikr people with did have it hard enough without being portrayed as murd3r3rs in every piece of media.

[@Nerdshrink88]

I once again appreciate your review of a game that I had no intention of playing and proving my decision correct lol. On a serious note, I await the day when game developers (and movie/television producer for that matter) will learn that depicting self harm and suicide is the exact opposite of helpful for people struggling with those particular mental health issues. Talking about experiences, the emotional toll these attempts and thoughts take on someone, the constant internal fight to combat these thoughts and actions, and plenty of other content is necessary and validating for people, but NOT THIS! Games like this and shows like 13 Ways to Manipulate Teenagers actively make the work I and my fellow health workers do more difficult and less effective. Normalizing the thoughts and emotions are productive, dramatizing the action is actively harmful!

[@MertKayKay]

I replied to this but it doesn't seem to have taken; but I wholeheartedly agree! Personally, I think on-screen depictions of suicide should be limited to AO rated games - particularly since Microsoft, Steam, and Sony don't allow AO games, so whilst these games could be made, they'd have absolutely no mainstream platform. If I had to pick, I'd rather have sex or gratuitous violence on my screen than something that actively causes people to self harm and I'm stunned that it's still permitted.

[@brawler5760]

@@MertKayKay I’d actually just rather watch one hour of Borderlands 1 and 3 gore than play Martha is Dead, because at least those games don’t take themselves seriously.

[@Bi0mega]

I loved when people were saying that censoring (questionably-aged) anime tiddy was the first step on the road to tyranny. Broadly speaking, I'm against censorship and, yes, broadly speaking, that is censorship. But you *really* need to be honest about what your complaint is and why you're making it. Just because I'm against censorship, it doesn't mean I'm going to stand up against every instance of it, especially when it's in favour of a bunch of nonce bait.

[@MertKayKay]

Yeah I think, especially since there is bare uncensored lady boob in this game, it is actually contrary to the point of "they won't even let there be boobs in games" - like you said Biomega, it's the nonce bait that's the issue

[@ddjsoyenby]

agreed.

[@pearline4684]

Thing is also there’s censorship and then there’s censorship. If a state incites censorship of certain opinions that can be scientifically based but just don’t benefit it then that’s effed up and unjustifiable. If a company censors a game for depicting something that is actively harming individuals based on an objectively immoral act then that censorship is justified.

[@sammyb6918]

Even as someone who is really into horror and didn't find the whole face sequence all that upsetting, I completely agree with what you said about it being unnecessary and gratuitous, and can also completely understand why someone wouldn't want to see it -- especially in what seems to otherwise be a relatively slow-paced psychological horror game. Like, I love some good old-fashioned blood and guts, but I feel like if they wanted to do it here they really needed to lean into the whole shlocky splatter film angle instead of trying to have their cake and eat it too. Scenes of sudden, shocking violence can definitely be effective in more grounded works but they need to *mean* something, and like you said, the supposed metaphorical significance of the scene completely falls apart if you think about it at all, because they... already have the exact same face.

[@sammyb6918]

Wow, I wrote this comment about halfway through the video, and I genuinely cannot believe it somehow got worse. If you want to make a gory, violent, shock horror game, then more power to you, but at least have the decency not to pretend it's anything else.

[@somik-i3x]

With the ending about mental health issue, it just show how some developers are immature about that. The two most mature representation of mental health that I saw was Hellblade Senua Sacrifice and Psychonaut 2. Both those games got mental health expert on it to get the subject right and the games is about building empathy toward people who live with it. Games can talk about anything, but that doesn't mean that anyone can do a game about those subjects. Sometime the most mature thing to do is knowing when you have no place in that conversation.

[@MertKayKay]

I love Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and I agree! I have a friend who is a psychiatrist and he and I were talking loads about it while I was playing. I have no say in its depiction of course but he seemed extremely impressed and I recommend that game to so many people I absolutely agree too. I think often, games will include dark themes and claim they're raising awareness just because those themes are present. It's so harmful. Thanks for watching Mikaël

[@Graysmog]

Yeah I remember playing this game ages ago and being so confused and annoyed at the entire premise. Why would you feel guilty about getting treated better after your sisters death? You literally had nothing to do with it and, while it was sad, I really doubt your sister who seemed to love you to pieces (heh) would hate you for just using her name. Like you said too, who cares about your mom anyway? She was insanely rude and you were there plenty of times where she basically disowned you, yet you still want her approval and admiration? Your dad was a high-ranking man! Like, what? I just remember sitting there after the face scene and just laughing my head off. The story felt so disconnected from itself and felt like it seriously forgot you were twins at multiple points. After that point I got to the end by sheer pig-headed stubbornness, but good lord, it felt like watching the movie "Us" all over again. Lots of pretty things to see with very abrupt tonal shifts that ended up at a finale that didn't make any sense and just left me feeling aggravated. I don't know if you've ever played Layers of Fear, but it's a very similar walking simulator where nothing actually happens. There's no failure state, stuff just happens and it has way less restraint on constant jump scares. A lot of new "psychological" horror games do this and vilify those with some kind of mental illness, and it gets very tiring very fast.

[@MertKayKay]

I tried Layers of Fear but I'm a huge huge baby who can't do jumpscares at all so I put it down 🤣 would you recommend I return to it?

[@Graysmog]

@@MertKayKay XD, that may be a problem then, since that's kind of all the game really is after the introduction. There's maybe like a five minute break between each jumpscare, depending on how fast you actually get through it. For me personally, jumpscares don't get much of a reaction out of me anymore since I've been playing and watching things full of them for years. Unless I max my volume and really get in the mood with some dark lighting and good horror beforehand, they're pretty predictable and very thoroughly follow the trend of "silence for two seconds and bam". It's a little hard for me to gauge it, but I'll try my best. Anyways I'm rambling, the really good jumpscares with actual buildup and tension kind of stop after you reach the "nightmare" section, or about half of the way through it. After that they become a lot easier to predict and handle, and you'll know when you're in it. I'll try not to spoil anything for you, but I would say there's maybe ... two more good jumpscares past that point, and they're very close to the end, but that's all I'll say. Personally the tidbits of a story that are there aren't very good, but the voice acting is top notch and pretty much carries the game. If you enjoy a very talkative protagonist and don't mind very cookie-cutter storytelling I would recommend it. It may not be my favorite horror game ever, but it has its moments later on and its aesthetics are very clearly a strong point that really help you get immersed into the feelings of despair a struggling artist would deal with. The series clearly did something right if it was able to get a sequel, after all. That being said, I would not recommend Layers of Fear 2. That was like Outlast 2 if you've ever played it, it was worse in just about every way. If you ever need some recommendations though relating to other games, I'm sure I can scrounge up some goodies from my dusty children's pop-up book of a brain. I swear, I had a list somewhere, haha.

[@MertKayKay]

Oh damn I did play Outlast 2, if Layers of Fear 2 is like that then I think I absolutely can grasp what you're suggesting here. Thanks so much for the in-depth explanation, I appreciate the time you took to do that. Maybe one day I'll go back to Layers of Fear, it doesn't look super long but... oh boy. Jumpscares :'(

[@Graysmog]

@@MertKayKay Haha, no worries, I enjoy my essays after all. If you ever do go back to it, I'd take it slow and explore the environment. It helps you really listen to the ambience and music, soaking stuff in horror games really makes a lasting impression, and Layers of Fear at least does that in spades.

[@YamiHoOu]

I feel the exact same way about Us. It really felt like it was trying too hard and any real meaning of the core theme was lost.

[@notrealnamenotatall2476]

Okay, so I just got here off the Rachel Foster video, and I feel like I want to repeat my comment from that game but just exceptionally angrier. I'm not one of those people who gets... exceptionally defensive about mental illness "causing people to become psychotic murderers", but I think this exceptionally gross portrayal of C-PTSD transforming into complete psychosis and then covering its dirty backside with a "Mental Health Awareness" sticker actually made me feel a little homicidal. It disgusts me that this thing made money off of that stupid censorship scandal and that the nastiness just went right over everyone's heads. Not to mention, even if we ignore how disgusting it is, the whole "the protagonist is insane/is a murderer/its all in their head" has been done to death. Everyone wants to be the Amnesia or the Layers of Fear, but never stops to consider if their game holds any merit.

[@MertKayKay]

I completely agree! They're like "oh we want to show awareness of mental health problems" but then they show someone becoming a horrible mass murderer basically unprompted? Like how is that a sensitive and measured way of demonstrating mental health struggles? Thanks for watching my videos btw and especially thanks for the comments, both were super interesting to read 🥰 I love your righteous fury

[@elizabethnorris7654]

It me too! I watched LPs of both games, and was left feeling very "... wtf", so I was quite relieved to stumble on these videos. Speaking as someone who takes brain pills for faulty brain, the Mental Health Awareness sticker left me cold. I found the whole thing to be such a jumbled mess, like the psychosis of the main character just seemed an excuse to make things striking and intriguing but without any actual narrative conclusion, it was so jarring to see "Mental Health Awareness :)" suddenly plugged at the end. Like you cannot show me all that and then pretend this happened on my planet???

[@divineeye147]

I hate it when media goes in to the “murderous split personality” trop it’s harmful and gives A horrible stigma to people with DID my oldest sister has DID and when she’s told people they look at her like she’s dangerous and it’s just tiring at this point

[@WhitneyDahlin]

I know! It's also just such a cop out. The equivalent of oOoOO it was all a dreammm 😭 it was such an interesting concept RUINED by the ending. I wish writers would STOP using mental illness as a solution. It's offensive and not creative and straight boring. Very frustrating. This, along with many other examples, just proves once again that bad writing will destroy an otherwise fantastic game. If the writing is great and the story is great bad graphics can easily be forgiven. But bad story telling cannot. A STORY DRIVEN game cannot be good if the story is bad.

[@pilloeglade5463]

The devs are probably super duper fans of the traditional ways of photography. But someone told them they couldn't go full ham with photo development simulation.

[@MertKayKay]

It's a shame! The photo development minigame is super cool. I bet if they made a game based around the photography element of this, it'd be really sweet and nice

[@padraigmurphy8710]

Having schizophrenia and one of my close friends psychosis, the ending could have save this fucking nightmare of controversy bait, after the two of us discussed it does strike me that you could read the entire story as the unreliable narrator that is Julia informing the player of her memory of what happened to her sister and what not, with the stress causing her to slip further and further into a delusion. Reality and the generated fiction causing her reality of whether her sister did or did not exist and the innumerable horrific things she’s done weighing her down until her sister does and does not exist, as both a human and a split personality. So she never cut her open etc etc. In essence her reality breaks apart at the seems and she’s left stitching it back together from both fact and fiction. However that reading requires some pretty intimate knowledge of how suffering from schizophrenia can affect a person and especially when it gets worse and worse and a break finally occurs. People are left piece back together sinews of themselves in the worst cases but it’s such a fucking shot in the dark from the Devs if that is what they was going for then having the doll at the end confront you with it would have been the perfect way to make it clear rather than have it simply parrot back to you what you think happened. If you have psychosis or schizophrenia or both and it’s made worse by Pervatol, yeah I can dig someone having a full mental collapse and having to stitch their reality back together but the ending with the doll just doesn’t sell it. They didn’t have a story, not properly, there is no confronting the player with the horrifically strenuous nature of realising you’re off base from reality about something monumental, that the delusion snapped in and you’ve misremembered things. The devs set up an amazing moment where you the player could have had to reconcile the disparate shreds of a person and the story they tell themselves and confront a regular person with that feeling of slowly slipping further and further into a delusion until yours sense of reality itself breaks down and you’ve to look yourself in the mirror and reassemble your own comprehension of how things happened and what you’re actually responsible for good or bad. To reassemble the story you tell yourself of you are and your own history, in my case, like assembling the mechanisms in a watch to see what’s causing it to drift out of time or lose seconds. But they fucking mangled the ending and the wasted potential honestly does sicken me, it wouldn’t have been an amazing way to portray a person given she does desecrate a corpse and shoot her mother amount other less notable things but it would have been better than this. If it were created by actually decent devs who had the intent of creating a genuine exploration of psychosis or some similar issues, then this ending and the themes could have been handled well and this is little more than a slap in the face to anyone suffering with them, there’s the core of a good game in here but honestly the entire situation surrounding it makes that helpline awareness tag at the end a fucking hollow ring of the “mental health is important bell” after the insult that is the ending. Some part of me really wanted this game to be simple misinterpreted but it’s so fucking clear it’s a fucking shill. TLDR: The ending ruins everything but not necessarily for the reasons it should in isolation but the thing that actually ruins it is the behaviour and intent of the developers.

[@MertKayKay]

This was an extremely interesting read, thanks so much for the insight! The idea that this could have been very close to someone's reality makes me all the more frustrated with how it handled it

[@HelplessFangirl]

The moment the dog scene happened I knew the game was out for shock

[@MertKayKay]

Absolutely - it's always the animals 😭

[@roconnx1571]

People have mentioned that removing the QTE mutilation was no loss for this game, and I agree. But for anyone that was "fighting" against the "censorship" of this game, I have to ask them; What did these QTE's even *ADD* to the game? Hell, how does cooking a dog alive and force feeding it to a child add to the story!? And why did the game put so much of it's horror into the mother's inhuman levels of abuse, when we already had a spooky ghost set up with lore and a reason to haunt the main character? Strong premise, abominable execution.

[@MertKayKay]

I wonder if they even knew what had been censored or if they just leapt on the outrage-mobile

[@NightmareLyra]

Honestly I don't think Sony went far enough, they should have also removed the post-mortem underage breast undressing and the actual visual of the suicide, not only the QTEs Also this game doesn't understand mental health at all for sure, I know several people with multiple personalities and they are all very nice in my experience. The whole "alternate personality is a murderer" cliche is so rare in real life that showing it in media just keeps making a bigger stigma for those with multiple personalities IRL

[@MertKayKay]

Yes absolutely, this whole "we're spreading awareness of mental illness" and then giving a girl murderous tendencies out of the blue. Insanely ignorant. Thanks for watching though and thank you for the comment!

[@kylieschuttloffel1261]

@@MertKayKay mentally ill and other neurodivergent people are *significantly* more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators of it, despite what DC comics and other media properties would have you believe. signed, a depressed, anxious, adhd, autistic girl who has been in two separate abusive situations and now also has ptsd. also, like, i may not have DID but a good number of my friends do, and most of the rest of my friend group has some sort of dissociative disorder or other. DID is caused by significant trauma as a child. "i cant handle this myself, i need someone to protect me, and no one is so i will create someone who can." i can believe the mother was abusive enough that julia developed DID as a result. but again, DID is caused by trauma. I have never met a person or system with any trauma-based disorder including DID who perpetrates violence like this. imagine actually writing a story that villainizes a victim of severe child abuse for the crime of developing a trauma disorder.

[@MertKayKay]

@@kylieschuttloffel1261 Absolutely agree, particularly with the comment on "never met anyone with DID who perpetuates violence like this" The team claimed they had psychiatrists helping them write this story but I fail to see why a psychiatrist would have any hand in perpetuating the myth that people with DID are loose time bombs and inherently dangerous

[@brawler5760]

Y’know, they could’ve done an MW2CR and just gave us an option to skip all that visceral shit. Yeah maybe it was cheap in that game, but I think it’d work wonders here…

[@Hazeljv3]

Having to turn interactive scenes of gruesome, visceral mutilation into cut scenes to appease Sony and calling THAT "censorship" is really stretching the definition of that word - almost to the point of meaninglessness.

[@MertKayKay]

I couldn't agree more!

[@dalecal1129]

What this game claims to be: A dark psychological horror that brings awareness to sensitive topics What it actually is: A boring walking simulator that unsubtly jams controversial scenes in for attention and trips over its own dick trying to be clever

[@brawler5760]

And somehow… this thing only has positive reviews…

[@gontear3377]

To be honest, the development studio wanted the backlash to boost sales. Come now, that prosecution-fetish message was so blatant. It just gives me the impression that their depravity extends outside Martha is Dead, and that the distasteful presentation of the sensitive topics was not an accident. Whether or not the distaste is limited to the execs and excludes the actual developers is an unknown.

[@AlexisHiemis]

Watching a Let's Player play Martha is Dead I genuinely felt like there were two stories here. One deals with the grief of losing a person that makes up a huge part of your identity, as it's often the case with identical twins, and the other one is an exploitation cringe fest about mental illness and DID and drug abuse. One is actually subtle and clever, and the other just wants to exploit horrible drama and make up a horrendous story about the worst abuse. Like, cooking a dog and feeding it to a kid? That's worse then most supervillains get. Or Guilia/Martha being beaten to the point of having her face scarred forever? It's just so unnecessary and doesn't serve the story, it's just there to be terrible. But oh no, there needs to be a *good reason* why someone would develop DID that is not just having their sister die, it must be something way more terrible and dramatic. I hate when writers get like this, when they just pile on because 'oh no, she has to get her mental illness *somehow*'. As if 'who am I without a huge part of my life and childhood, am I even whole now, how does this change our family dynamic' aren't fundamental questions that can carry the game on it's own. Also, Nazis, of course, even though they play no role at all in this. I sometimes feel that there is a very distinct kind of misogyny in this perception that emotional trauma and the loss of relationships are not dramatic enough on their own if they happen to a women. No, they have to have a complete breakdown, violent or self-harming or both. And I was absolutely disappointed about how they didn't even have the confidence in their story to answer the questions. When it comes to Lapo, I think the intention in game is that Giulia/Martha was pregnant with Lapos kid, that he was a resistence fighter and died and she only got the news about it. So she never found his bloody corpse but only had nightmares about it or hallucinated it, and the stress (or use of drugs) produced her miscarriage. Which is still ... kinda weird and exploitative. Miscarriages and unwanted pregnacies are way to personal and traumatic events to be used like that in my eyes, but well, it didn't stop them with any other topic. A very good video, again!

[@GlitchMothLu]

Something interesting I learned during my playthrough of Town of Light recently is that Guilia's mom and dad are both mentioned in Irene's (the mom's) medical records and doctor notes littering the asylum, where she was a patient at some point, and they mention her pregnancy briefly, her medication, and even mention preparing for Guilia to be evaluated. Both games are connected, and you can get a little more insight on this game from Town of Light, which came out first.

[@MertKayKay]

Ooo a bit of in-universe continuity! I like it :D

[@kandycult]

I have DID and the sudden "oh Martha is actually a barrier made from trauma" was fucking cheap Also the term isn't "split personality", it's either alter or another term /gen To add on- your game reviews are helpful to what I want to get into

[@MertKayKay]

Thank you very much for the feedback on the terminology there! And god damn yes, it was such a cheap twist! Literally just a story cop out that they tried to frame as "mental health awareness", downright rude writing. Thanks for watching Everette

[@kandycult]

@@MertKayKay of course! If a story wants to do mental health awareness, then they need to have a cohesive story that was made in consulting people with experience and research

[@jbear3478]

So she didn't take her sister's identity? She just psychologically suddenly split into an alter? Did she ever have a sister?

[@ariannebrodeur]

@@jbear3478 you're completely valid to be confused, most people are bc the game changes it's mind approximately 800 times. But to answer your question, as far as the ending seems to fair, yes, there was never a sister. Giulia was one child, and childhood trauma brought on Dissociative Identity Disorder, and Martha was her first and only alter as far as we know. The end of the game tries to make you question whether Martha or Giulia were the first identity and it's just confusing af so really all we can safely say is there was only one physical girl and the entirety of the first half of the game was completely useless bollocks bc none of it was real

[@dramaghost999]

“Soak it up, fuck her, steal from her purse too…” Funny as a stand-alone statement, fucking hilarious with your delivery!! Lol 😂

[@ddjsoyenby]

i gotta hand it to the mother in this game being so bad a literal n@z1 general is appealing compared to her is an accomplishment, and as someone making a game that deals with heavy issues (which i acknowledge some i probaly f'ed up) it is not that hard to think through implications and make changes where something would be problematic; split personalities don't work like that and the idea they do is harmful.

[@solarsbrrah6371]

SO glad I discovered, or more accurately was recommended your video on The Suicide of Rachel Foster yesterday - I'm kind of obsessed with your long form reviews/video essays - they're well thought out, argued, and articulated with tons of gameplay footage. I can't imagine how much work goes into it, but please know that it is greatly appreciated

[@MertKayKay]

Thank you Solar!! :D So happy you like them

[@dogearflopper7011]

41:14 Every gamer is familiar with the creeping, icy terror of realizing your save file is borked.

[@sarahmacdonald955]

The whole point of a big twist in media is the shocking and rewarding realization on the part of the viewer/reader/player that the clues were there all along and they missed them due to their own pre-conceived notions and implicit bias. The desire to immediately re-engage with that media knowing the truth to see all the things you missed and enjoy the media anew thanks to the re-contextualization of knowing the ending is the draw of such stories. Everything, both the red herring as well as the true twist *must* still work upon re-examination. This can be extremely fun to engage with when the narrative is well written and everything falls into place. However... If it's not? You end up with a piece of media that has the viewer/reader/player re-examining the work with the twist ending in mind and not understanding how it's possible. Having more questions than answers upon a second playthrough/viewing/reading is a mark of shoddy writing and/or poor editing. Like someone wrote 256 pages of a decided upon narrative, and upon reaching the final chapter took a break and watched The 6th Sense. Then suddenly decided to write in a twist, and never went back to the first 256 pages to make sure it worked. If I were more cynical I would say that the slow walking speed, plodding nature of the plot, un-skippable cutscenes, long load times, and unrepaired save game crash were all intentionally designed to discourage anyone from ever playing it a second time, lest they see all of the downright terrible contradictions to their "twist ending". MertKayKay if you see this, I truly appreciate you taking the time to respond to my comment on your video about Medium and you have a new subscriber.

[@MertKayKay]

Hey Sarah! Thanks so much for the comment and I completely agree! There's a lot in this game about faulty memory but you play the faulty memories, and all the twists come down to "Oh I misremembered that" but there are no CLUES that you're misremembering anything or that things happen differently! It's an absurdly frustrating story. Like you said: they watched Sixth Sense, they decided a "you were x all along" plot would work better, they did nothing to address it throughout the story. Absolutely terribly written. Thank you for watching

[@TempestRequiem0]

The problem with the writing in all of these style of stories is that they are built around these big either shocking or emotional moments (in the writers' head anyways), and getting to them is all that matters resulting in all the connective tissue being weak and insubstantial (logic most likely drowning in a lake with its hamstrings cut), and most importantly the characters being paper thin.

[@MertKayKay]

Yeah I agree, I think the writers had several big scenes in mind they really wanted to show, but when they couldn't connect it coherently they resorted to dream sequences/hallucinations with no build up or substance

[@kikiohearts]

I'm so glad I found this in my recommendations even if it's 10 months late. As a triplet (3 sisters identical) I can understand why she would use her identical twins face. For me I don't think I look a thing like my sisters but our parents can barely tell us apart now and we're in our 30s. She wanted to completely be her sister, see her self as her sister, consume her identity, and to do that; she needs to look JUST like her, even to herself so... face off. This story kinda hits close to home because when I was younger (teen) there were times I wanted to be my other sisters, be it that I thought they were far far more pretty then me (funny right?) Or more social had more friends ect. When we were children we used to pretend to be each other, swap classes, change our clothes in the bathrooms at school and trick our parents.. the whole shabang.. but as I got older I'm more confident in myself and I don't think anyone could have a closer relationship with me ever not even my husband or children and I love them more than I can imagine. But there's just this weird thing that ties you together. ... eh.. still story is kinda trash. There's my very long two cents that don't even contribute to the review of the game.

[@MertKayKay]

I adore this comment, thank you for sharing the quintessential triplet experience

[@RobinLeft]

Seeing the "Stop Immersion" prompt when you're developing the photos kinda made me laugh, considering how much the game's writing falls apart

[@MertKayKay]

Haha, like a subtle bit of foreshadowing :D

[@UberNoodle]

@1:04:40 So ... what?! Are you telling me that a certain element in the gaming community went to Maximum Indignant Outrage based on no information at all, only to (presumably) discover later that the situation was nowhere near as cataclysmic as they had made out, but by then, they'd all slithered back into the woodwork waiting for the next outrage apocalypse to occur? That never happens!

[@MertKayKay]

Literally a once in a lifetime occurrence. We should be grateful to bear witness

[@zenprince2892]

i'd watched your analysis on Rachel Foster a few weeks ago and prayed you might have made one on this game too at some point because i was absolutely blown away by how i could find hardly (if any) negative opinions about this game at all i first heard about it on tiktok, described as "the most disturbing video game of the year" which admittedly peaked my interest enough to watch a full, 7 hour long playthrough of it with a couple of friends. like most people i thought the premise was good at the beginning, and then my friends and myself watched on in horror and disgust (not the kind the developers intended, or maybe they did, who knows) as the game derails its plot to become just a horrific depiction of mental health. as someone who suffers from survivors guilt, suicidal thoughts, ptsd, the works - i was absolutely insulted and my gut turned more than a few times watching the ending chapter of the game. it genuinely made me sick to my stomach, and my friends, too. we watched it all just to see how far it'd go and morbid curiosity, but all of us came out regretting the time we wound up wasting with it. the game is pretty, sure, and the graphics are good, but there's really not much else to compliment it for around three hours of it was all of us just sitting and waiting for something to happen, ANYTHING at all, and numerous times i thought to just turn it off we were all so bored. and then it just throws every offensive depiction of horrific things it can squeeze in to the next 2 hours at one time and hits us all with whiplash and a hankering to throw up, or get enraged, which was the majority. i even checked to see if there were negative reviews, and came up to next to none, just one or two complaining about the crashing issue you mentioned. i was in shock and felt crazy that this game made me feel so gross i appreciate your take on it and feel validated now lmao thank you

[@MertKayKay]

Hey I'm glad to know my review brought you some kind of satisfaction - I saw a lot of positive reviews as well. Personally I thought it was an insult and an exploitative piece of media specifically geared towards broadcasting shocking scenes under the guise of "spreading awareness". Boring at best and utterly tone deaf at worst. The suicide hotline at the end was chef's kiss Shame too because I liked the photography, maybe that should be the focus of their next game instead. Thanks for watching! Glad you enjoyed it 🥰

[@brawler5760]

The fact that this game only has positive reviews really says it all, they accomplished what they did and got the attention they needed. Even though this game is a massive shit that’s on par with Rachel Foster…

[@TrazzyStar]

One interesting thing (that I’m sure the developers had no idea about) is that post-mortem abortions were kinda the original ones, at least in Europe. Christian would cut open a dying/dead mother because they decided it was most important to bless the baby before it also died.

[@Aceacebabe]

I love to hear your reading of these jumbled horror games with bad plotlines! I just found you yesterday and honestly with his in depth you go I'm surprised you haven't had more people find your channel! Def an underrated channel.

[@MertKayKay]

Thank you so much AIZ! 😍😍 It's a lot of fun so hopefully there'll be plenty more to come

[@evanhonnert1169]

"Hey look it's a Bidoof" my favorite of your edits so far

[@MertKayKay]

Thank you, they're rare but I do my best

[@pygmybean8050]

I learned card reading from my grandma using playing cards. I don’t know if they still do this in Italy, but all the Italian and Sicilian families near me in the US do something similar. There’s lots of weird ghost stories and mysticism too.

[@lionwithglasses8590]

This game has to have one of the most confusing plots I've ever seen. Thank you so much for going as in depth as you did!

[@MertKayKay]

Thanks Lion! I remember finishing this script and suddenly having a million more things I wanted to say :'D glad you liked the review! It was fun to make

[@lionwithglasses8590]

You're welcome! Looking forward to seeing what you review next!

[@AmbrosiaBriefs]

Just found your channel through the Rachel Foster video. I really appreciate you addressing these games with "mature" themes and discussing why it feels shallow. It can be really frustrating when people feel that a story deserves to be praised just because it's the first time they've seen that topic tackled, even if it's not done well. Makes me feel like a bad guy when I think it could have done better. I find your comments really cathartic even if I haven't experienced that with these particular games. You've got my sub lol 👍

[@MertKayKay]

Thanks so much Olivia! And yes I agree, people see a dark theme in a game and go "wow they tackled a dark theme" but like... Did they? 😂

[@AliceLoverdrive]

I'm a _gore_ artist whose works depict practically nothing but rotting corpses, and I kept scratching my head with a singular question: "what in the name of fuck?!" Just... Why? Why does it exist? Anyway, I've just found your channel and I'm very glad I did, you are awesome!

[@MertKayKay]

Thank you Alice! And welcome to the channel :D Also, very cool hobby.

[@ChronoHarvester]

That decision with the nanny would have made me walk away from the game, pulling my hair, if I was playing myself. It is right out of a soulless drama show.

[@-chippedstars-2889]

The bidoof joke made me laugh so HARD

[@DarkArt888]

I think most people with DID (myself included) are somewhere between utterly numb and annoyed to the point of outrage how often our disorder is used as a plot twist in thrillers and horror movies. Being charitable with the game for half a second (and presuming that WAS what the game is getting at, that Martha/Giulia had DID) the visual metaphor of the puppet show, the face-wearing, the "deafness" as a conceptual idea of the aspects of yourself silently crying out and the lady in the lake being aspects to represent her disorder is actually kind of fantastic. I feel like at some had some good ideas that all got lost in the entropy of whatever this game actually turned out to be. But it all kind of shits the bed as most narratives with a DID plot twist do trying to bury the lead. It's true that many people (including myself) live with DID for years and don't know that have it, have a hard time believing they have it even after they're diagnosed. But DID isn't a psychotic disorder. Long before you know exactly what's up you know something is wrong with you, you feel the missing time, you're aware of people commenting on your behavior being different. My closest friends thought I was having mood swings and a bad memory. The reality of the disorder (as is many heavily sensationalized mental disorders) is that it's extremely mundane and kind of pedestrian in practice. There's a lack of continuity in your consciousness, which makes it seem like (and in some circumstances functionally means) you're more than one "person." All your alters are still you, just, mild to wildly different versions of you depending on which memories they have. Some parts of your life are shared, some are separate. But you aren't going to construct psychotic delusions of one or more of your alters being independent agents you think you can literally interact with, and you're not going to have one alter who's a secret evil murderer when you aren't. DID is more or less trauma-induced brain damage where your mind can't rationalize all aspects of yourself together so it creates barriers of amnesia to isolate specific elements as a means of survival. Martha being functionally/metaphorically mute and deaf to get away with self-actualizing her/Giulia's emotional needs is actually kind of a great exploration of that conceptually. That's completely undermined by the game's insistence of convincing you Giulia and Martha are literally two different people and obliterates any narrative potential that concept had. These plot twist piss takes with mental illness genuinely do fuck with the lives of people who live with these disorders when trying to be understood by people around you. I speak from experience.

[@Art-zp1qg]

I’ve been waiting for someone to cover this game and the issues I have with it. None of which are over censorship. Hell yeah. I recently checked and one of my previous comments on your channel was not there for some reason, but I really like your videos and how well they’re made. Good job!

[@MertKayKay]

Hey Art! It's a shame your previous comment didn't take but I'm delighted to see this one. Yes I found that my issues with the game itself barely came down to censorship in the end, all-in-all I just found it such a dull game, it crashed constantly, my save files corrupted twice, the 'twists' were so un-earned... be excited to hear what you yourself think. Annoyingly as soon as it was uploaded I suddenly felt like I had more to say but it was too late. That's always how it goes.

[@Art-zp1qg]

@@MertKayKay It’s okay. My previous comment was me complimenting your attention to detail about another video game haha. But yeah, this game had a lot going for it initially. I liked the attention to detail and time period-accurate bits, though ultimately it was so purposeless, which seems to be a theme of the game. The atmosphere, graphics and the animation looked nice, and it looked really good to watch people play it. My favorite part of the game was the death monologue since it was so cool. I will sometimes look at that death puppet show monologue just because of how much I liked it. It really fell downhill after then, though it was pretty boring before that too honestly. So much stuff just went nowhere and felt thrown in just so that it would make you think. I feel like they were trying to make a horror type of story with an unreliable narrator, but I wish they’d not used such cliche and thoughtless tropes to make it. Or that they’d at least make it somewhat fun to play. I do feel like it’s not one of those glorified walking simulators, there’s things that take effort and logic to do at least. But holy shit all that slowness made me want to tear my chest open and I’m not even being hyperbolic. Frankly the nail in the coffin for me was that ear-bleeding “music” that they use every time something gory is happening that sounds like someone got their nails stuck on guitar strings a million times. All the stuff about mental health, DID, and the showcasing of self harm on screen as part of the gameplay… like… I’m so tired of repeating myself on these things. These topics require care, and they rarely get the care they deserve while being portrayed. And as a mentally ill person who has self harmed before, it was just wild. Compounded with the fact that none of it made sense, to the point where the story retconned itself many times halfway through, it all makes me just tired at the end of the day.

[@MertKayKay]

I completely agree with everything you've said; I think it's a beautiful game and when I was picking through the OST to collect some music for this video I realised it had a (mostly) really good soundtrack too, but it just wasn't enough. And the cool Grim Reaper puppet! Like you said the gameplay was super slow. I loved how it seemed like a cool suspenseful horror at first but you're right, the unreliable-ness was just silly. Like they relied on the "Oh I just didn't remember it correctly" trope for every single twist which just made it feel so cheap. I thought they could have made the gap between Martha/Giulia's bed turn into a mirror so it's just a reflection of the one bed; I thought maybe when you go outside of the house, Martha's room could not be there, making the interior impossibly sized, for example, but even with that there's just too much in the game that means the twists just aren't that impactful. Either way, thanks for watching the video and I'm glad to hear you felt the same! I think the game leaned very heavily on its 'advertising' and would have faded into obscurity without it

[@taliesinmorgan7237]

I can't believe I've never heard of this game before, this plot is WILD. Thank you for such a great, in depth review!

[@MertKayKay]

No worries Taliesin!! Thanks for watching

[@ravengreenwold3258]

I was soooo disappointed by the end of Martha is dead. IDK why but the whole reveal didn't make sense with a lot of the framing of the early scenes? I genuinely liked the starting set up of the mystery. I don't get why we had to go with the "WooOOOOoo so shocking, its two personalities". like??? Why are villianize mental illness then make it out like its for awareness??? It drives me crazy how theres so many nonsensical plot holes with the end? It feels like they changed it because someone thought "the mother did it seemed too obvious". All in all its weird how I got hooked in the start but then like it goes down hill making me bored and rolling my eyes.

[@justinkroboth360]

"like a spilled Christmas pudding" made me shudder more than of the scenes shown in this video, omfg

[@SAUglaz]

Every time i saw this game's title i thought "Well that's what happens when you don't follow Superman's instructions!"

[@isenokami7810]

I get your point, since the game does seem to use it to just get rid of moral ambiguity, but it seems like there’d be a lot to explore in the concept of a “good Nazi”. There are certainly stories following people who work for oppressive regimes but don’t believe in them-Papers Please and Fahrenheit 451 come to mind just off the top of my head-but I imagine being that kind of guy as a Nazi, without explicitly being a spy, would be hell. Now I kinda want a game about that. Try and balance your morals and your hellish job, only for that to be untenable by nature and watch as it all falls apart.

[@spacejasontodd]

Mostly unrelated but the very first time you showed us a bit of the scenery I immediately got a feeling I recognized it and wouldn't you know it, the game indeed takes place in Tuscany :) My guess was either that or Umbria since the two are pretty much undistinguishable when it comes to their mountain ranges. Plus it's always fun to see and hear a language you understand in mainstream media

[@MF-R]

That's why I stopped going to church; all those gang signs made me think I was getting in too deep.

[@phantasmrain]

"Got a flow like spilled Christmas pudding", my goodness!

[@MertKayKay]

A schooltime nightmare 😔

[@johnskelington]

This game's Steam page now has a section promoting the upcoming game, "Gori: Cuddly Carnage." I just thought someone would like to know this.

[@thebuilder5271]

For 28:41, false memories are common with OCD, like worrying that you are misremembering something that happened,, usually with real event OCD where you feel extreme guilt. So her thinking she was somehow responsible for Martha’s death could be from that. Though I haven’t finished watching lol

[@DarkKnightroolz]

ugh, suicide and self harm done well in media (as someone who has struggled myself) I feel is best done through symbolism, cause and effect, if somewhat explicit in writing or dialog. I have a huge heart for mental health and am passionate about it. I love both art and horror especially that uses it- and does it well. While it has its issues- I think Silent Hill 2 is a great example of how trauma can create our monsters. Unlike The medium, I don't even see the positives or good ideas here. I just see a lot of bleh with some shock scenes that could have been used well (minus the self harm one) by someone who actually cared and knew what they were doing in a good context.

[@ddjsoyenby]

also on the "living with a deaf person" thing can confirm it is loud though the one i do with went deaf before learning to talk completely.

[@justinkroboth360]

I wish I could put into words how much joy you brought to me today when it dawned on me just how the developers seem to think deaf people... exist. When I realize that they legitimately seem to think that deaf people also make zero noise whatsoever, like fucking ghosts, I started laughing uncontrollably for a couple minutes and the more I thought about it, the dumber and dumber it started to sound, and then the harder I laughed. Thank you so much for that moment, good grief. I'm in fucking tears, here, lmao Edit: Omfg, I did not know it would continue to spiral out and cartwheel its way into that level of stupidity. Holy shit. Being convoluted or edgy on purpose is not the same thing as being meaningful. Like, what the fuck were they even trying to say with this? Why even have the nazi subplot? It means nothing. Second edit: Bravo to you re: REAL censorship vs what these developers claim they faced.

[@KairiKunai]

Firstly, I've been binging your videos and I really really love your input on games and subjects like this. You're incredibly articulate and I love listening to you talk about these things!! Second, the first time I watched this game I was so absolutely lost at the plot of this game that I didn't even notice some of the huge plot holes you pointed out (The second bed, photos showing martha, etc.) because it was already so poorly written and just.. muddy? I STILL don't understand the puppet re-enactments or what was with the mother being nice to the "martha" side and not Giulia when Martha never really existed. All I grasped was "mother ebil" and "Giulia got DiD from it". ...Which.. I still don't understand the "your sister is deaf" thing either? Was their a purpose to that? A hint that she was never there and perhaps why she was never spoken to directly?.. (But that was barely at all touched upon beyond the "twist" so--) I dunno. Perhaps this game is 2deep4me. This game is very pretty but as you said it just feels like shock content for the sake of marketing. Pretty disappointing cause the start of the game was quite promising. The Nazi thing could've probably been entirely nixx'd and you wouldn't notice a difference. Everything "shocking" was crammed into this game for the sake of it. :( I'm almost surprised they didn''t try to find a way to include a ridiculous SA plot ontop of it. Jeesh

[@MertKayKay]

Aww Soni I'm so glad to hear you like my videos! Thanks for watching them, I really appreciate it 🥰 And yeah I was really confused about that, eventually I assumed that Giulia had literally misremembered there being two beds or something and we're literally playing her muddy memories - but at that point the twists are very unearned? So who knows I agree too; the game is BEAUT and I loved the photography mechanics. I think they should have learned more into the ghosts and the photography than just trying to horrify their audience, there's some really good stuff here but it's just shock horror Anyway, thanks for the comment, you made my morning

[@hexinthelilypond4213]

Any sort of “the protagonist was actually crazy!” ending feels like the “it was all a dream” copout. Literally just “it was all a dream” but edgy.

[@calemr]

After hearing you describe the Slog of triggering event flags by going back and forth to the dark room, I just want to thank you for this video. I'm a tangential fan of horror: I don't tend to enjoy playing horror games (Outside of those I don't see as horror, like Dead Space 1+2, or Resident Evil 4+5. Action games with a horror skin.), But I still find them very interesting. Explorations as to why they're good or bad, and discussions of the plot with a slight disconnect from the gameplay I know I wouldn't enjoy. So, thank you for your time and effort.

[@MertKayKay]

Thanks Cal! I'm really glad you enjoyed it. I wanted to include enough that anyone with a morbid curiosity would hopefully get what they wanted, but without being needlessly gratuitous

[@thebingus7243]

its shocking theyre so willing to research historical materials to understand camera work but not mental and physical conditions. like why do they have no knowledge of how being deaf works? why couldn't they do a simple google search on DID before basing their plotpoint on it. you cant base a message on your game saying mental health is important ❤ and then actively spreading dangerous messaging on how mentally ill people act. theres already so much horror in the idea of mascarading as your dead sister. if you truly wanted to tell a story about mental health, you didnt need all that blood and murder to tell it.

[@EvanBear]

This is NOT AT ALL how it is to live with suicidal thoughts.

[@MertKayKay]

I thought so! Seeing people claim it was a faithful representation felt so disingenuous.

[@EvanBear]

@@MertKayKay Yes, I have had suicidal thoughts for a majority of my life (not anymore, thanks to medication!) and this feels like hollow lip service. And then to slap hotlines at the end like "Look here, we're doing so good!" is just... It feels fake. That's about as good as I can describe it. I also think people with BPD will want to have a word about this because either disorder BPD can refer to is heavily stigmatized and this portrayal does NOT help.

[@eveandromeda]

I feel like you were a bit too kind regarding the game's narrative. While I agree it suffered from needing to be thirteen chapters, I don't think it would have worked even in a shorter format. The game effectively has five different plots it wants to tell. A story about a dead twin stealing the other's identity, a story about a gruesome murder you're trying to solve, a story about child abuse, a story about the horrors of wartime and the instability it brings, and a folk-legend supernatural horror. All of these different, complex, convoluted plots and also make every single character an unreliable narrator, have it all be a flashback sequence, and implement non-chronological storytelling. It wasn't just that the writers had to stretch a boring plot to fill airtime, they took every cool idea they had and implemented it into a single game without even considering how they'd mesh together. Good games - in my opinion - know their narrative limits. There's a reason Dragon Quest XII won't be an allegory for grieving over the death of a loved one, or Silent Hills won't be told in reverse order, with the prologue being the final chapter. The more you play with a stories messages or format, the more you really have to think about the implications of what you're saying. And with something like Martha is Dead, it's format and narrative is so twisted that you can come away with any number of horrible morals. "Complying with an abuser to avoid abuse is morally bad and a disturbed thing to do." "Plurals are violent, unstable sociopaths who don't understand the world and could snap and kill everyone around them." etc etc. So not only does this game's story suck, but it's so complex that you end up with a physical dead twin who doesn't exist but does exist and is only an alter of Giulia but also died when Giulia's mom killed her but also wrote letters to her but was all a metaphor for abuse or mental illness or something. When you ignore the gore, ignore the vile shit they put in purely for controversy, there's nothing. It's five different first drafts that an intern jumbled together on the way to work, and the director took the entire thing as a finished final script.

[@MertKayKay]

I love this comment! This is so true actually; I didn't consider all the different plotlines just tangled together like spaghetti under 10 different layers of bullshit chronology and all sorts of 'the plot twist is that i don't remember hehe'

[@rudycory1721]

I can't believe that the same developers who made The Town of Light made this massive step-down with this game. Town of Light did not have such a convoluted story that makes you feel stupid, just the story of a girl in a mental health institute in early 1900s Italy with no excessive use of over-the-top gore to make more money by shock value.

[@brawler5760]

I guess Town of Light didn’t take off so they decided cheap shock value with excessive gore and a WW2 setting would be the best course of action.

[@lilylohmann614]

I was going to comment that having that kickass Death puppet tell the story of the White Lady as a sort or intro cutscene would have gone hard, and then I watched the rest of the video. I think the frustrating thing is that this story has so much potential. Her pulling out a gun is honestly comedic in how abrupt it is, and it reminds me of the fiction I wrote when I was eleven and had no idea how to write an ending. And that’s the frustrating thing! It reminds me of when I was in 5th-6th grade! I’m 22 now, and I’ve improved a lot in my writing. Apparently these people haven’t.

[@wigglerwarrior3167]

16:49 EIGHTEEN [REDACTED] COWBOYS IN THE [REDACTED] AT [REDACTED]

[@hellTOtheYER]

The word Nonce isn’t used anywhere near enough in today’s world.

[@driftcowboy2925]

This was a pretty radical long form take on the game. I enjoyed a decent part of the story, but visually, it was pretty beautiful. Like an odd art film. Anyway, your take on it made me subscribe, excited to see the rest of your videos.

[@MertKayKay]

Aww thanks Cowboy! I really loved the photography minigame and a good portion of the story too. I'm super glad you enjoyed it and thanks for the sub

[@ombra711]

Basically watched a Tale of Two sisters and threw in so many additional concepts they forgot what inspired it and were too far along to logically correct course.

[@puppyhowler]

when i first played this game i was confused af at the final twist. i get they wanted to go for the "up for interpretation" ending... but frankly, games like What Remains of Edith Finch did it better. the game understandably tells the story but leaves details open just enough for people to speculate. a family that was "cursed" with death, is this curse real? or is it a scapegoat the family uses to avoid taking responsibility for their recklessness? is it a literal curse, or is it metaphorical? it's up to the player to come to those conclusions. meanwhile, Martha is dead raises more questions than answers and confuses the audience with asinine plot twists that make literally no sense. like... how is Martha not real when there are literally two beds in Guilia's room? how is she not real if her parents talked about her when Giulia isn't around? why is there a newspaper article about Martha's death? there was literally an entire funeral scene wtf was that about? If Lappo isn't real then who got Guilia/Martha pregnant? if Martha isn't real then what the hell was up with the pictures that showed Guilia in the water carrying Martha? let's humor the game a bit and say Martha ISN'T real for a second. was she a figment of Guilia's imagination? was she a DID alter? the story makes no sense, and apparently, there are multiple endings... but the endings aren't very different from one another.

[@Quikie93]

I love that they didn't lean into the jumpscares I love horror, but I really genuinely despice jumpscares, it just feels cheap and i dont handle them well - they never seem to really add to the horror either, just serves as a cheap way to make me jump.

[@MertKayKay]

Oh absolutely Quikie, I can't stand jumpscares 😭

[@kingintern7566]

Me, watching this from the beginning: ah what an interesting premise to explore and having a character that is overtly morally ambiguous i wonder how they fuck it up Midway through: Ok yeah that's fucked up yeah that kinda undermines everything so far 20 minutes left: HUH WHAT EXCUSE ME???

[@MegaFrannypants]

I remember watching the first ten-ish minutes of a play-through of this game and then screaming at the screen and stopping the video. So glad to hear someone take this apart for the gross bullshit that it is.

[@MertKayKay]

Happy to deliver Frances 😎

[@StrawberryOverlord]

absolutely screaming at "a brillian example of living with bipolar disorder and suicidal thoughts" like as a bipolar person who has suicidal thoughts, that is so innacurate. I know ever Bipolar person is different, but i feel like they're mixing up bipolar (an emotional disturbance) with a personality disorder.

[@MertKayKay]

Hey Strawberry! I thought so! I remember seeing that review and being like... I'm not qualified to comment on the accuracy of this but it SEEMS like it's completely false. I wonder if the reviewer was straight-up lying or if they have a particularly rough case of it... to the point where they're killing family members?

[@bbalmer7878]

okay, the real ending is the entire game was imagined because you are taking Percelin

[@bbalmer7878]

It is funny, if it had just been vile pulp exploitation I might have been sympathetic. If it had lived up to is pretenses, I might have been sympathetic. But pretentious bullshit that is hollow ANDDDDD poorly optimized saves? Fuck this shit, snuff films are more creatively responsible.

[@kittyphinex7115]

Whoever said "this is a brilliant example of living with bipolar and suicidal thoughts" You clearly don't have bipolar, OR suicidal thoughts??? This is NOT bipolar, it's a conglomerate of mental issues pushed into one incoherent mess that stigmatizes those who genuinely suffer and those who say it's good representation have no idea what they're talking about

[@yesterdaysrose5446]

Haven't watched this beyond the opening, but: My background: Depression and anxiety, childhood death phobia. Played this on Xbox, so no censoring. Yet, I had to specifically check when pizza cutters were invented. Apparently, by 1940s it was already well fashionable, world wide, to have ALL EDGE AND NO POINT. /stolen joke I have to say I had no problem finishing the game. But the first mutilation scene made me go "OW THAT'S EDGY, thank goodness I'm drunk". The chapel scene made me go "Oh this is fucking ravaging, I don't know if I want to do this, I better skip this one." [narration] "Fucking WHAT?" The insanity scenes were like "OK this is just stupid." FINAL disassociation scene was like "...I don't think they consulted anyone." The Italian Resistance scenes were like "Oh apparently my father, THE GERMAN GENERAL, doesn't really, super serious I swear, want to fight the war? Well if the Partisans murder him, that will save him from gallows at Nuremberg, am I right?" (ah the power of hindsight) As an amateur photographer, and someone who appreciates the film age, I was mildly annoyed. I knew what they were going for, but it just wasn't an interesting approximation of film photography, as far as game mechanics go. Needlessly simplified, yet needlessly complicated. At best, follow the prompts. That's it. And on top of that, they screwed up the film designation. (It's Kodak Type 120 Film. Not "120mm" film. Doesn't even make sense.) But I did actually appreciate the first scene where you had to photograph Martha in the middle of the night. I felt PROUD completing that without FEAR, the general creepiness of the scene notwithstanding. ...Shit. I'm glad we don't do open casket funerals in this country.

[@MertKayKay]

I loved reading this comment, thanks for the breakdown of your thoughts :D I also loved the middle of the night photography bit! The start of this game is so tense and scary and I remember being far too terrified to even try! Thanks for sharing

[@bird2793]

When you brought up the pizza cutter, I assumed you were going to suggest that Giulia use that to cut open Martha's corpse...oops

[@Proto-Martyr]

This would've worked better as a movie rather than a game imo. The story is pretty interesting but I don't see how they could've made a game out of it that isn't just a walking sim.

[@KaeserLooty]

As someone who come from the developers's city, I am very dissapointed seeing our history(nazi occupation) and legends(dama bianca/white lady) in such bad and disrespectful game. It could have been an awesome game about traditional family toxicity, sibling love and trauma from historical context, while using our culture(puppets and legends) as a mean, instead is whatever it is...