Martha Is Dead is the talk of the town these days due to the alleged censorship from Sony which has led to the game facing changes on PlayStation consoles.
While the game is not out yet, it has been given a rating across different countries around the world. In the USA, it has been rated Mature by ESRB, while in the EU, it has been given a PEGI 18 rating.
So you might be wondering what is mature content has turned out to be so controversial for the game. Well, we do have a full description of all the violent scenes in Martha is Dead as described by IMDA Singapore.
‘Martha Is Dead’ is a horror game set in 1944 Italy during World War 2 where the player assumes the role of Giulia, the daughter of a German soldier. After finding her twin sister Martha’s body in the lake, she sets off to uncover the truth about Martha’s mysterious death.
The game is rated M18 for strong violence and nudity.
Played from a first-person perspective, the player will control Giulia to explore the Italian countryside where she will search for clues to solve Martha’s death. The story is advanced by interacting with characters, picking up key items and solving puzzles.
As the game progresses, the player will encounter surreal sequences containing graphic portrayals of violence, including visible bloodletting and depictions of self-harm. The stronger sequences include a scene of a character slicing and peeling off the facial skin of a corpse with a razor blade before wearing it like a mask; a scene of a character stabbing and cutting open a corpse’s abdomen with a pair of fabric scissors before pulling out a dead foetus with her bare hands; and a scene of a character, with her hands pierced with hooks and strung up like a puppet, slitting her own wrist. These scenes are drawn-out, and the moment of infliction is clearly visible. The game also features scenes with mutilated and dismembered corpses, mangled human remains, and a sequence where a character has to traverse to a burial pit while holding a decapitated head. These graphic depictions of violence are more appropriate under the M18 rating where the Classification Guidelines allow “treatment and exploration of mature themes appropriate to persons aged 18 and above” and “depictions of realistic violence, such as killing, maiming or causing other serious injury to humanoid characters”.
During the course of the game, the player will encounter depictions of female nudity that are of non-sexual context. In one scene, a character is seen unbuttoning the dress of a woman’s corpse where her bare breasts and nipples are visible. Other scenes depict life-size human-like glass dolls with glossy, sometimes fragmented skin. These dolls are naked, with their breasts and outlines of their groin exposed. These depictions are contained under the M18 rating where the Classification Guidelines allow “depiction of topless nudity or occasional full-frontal nudity”.
Coarse language such as “f**k” and its variations are used in the dialogue text. Crude words such as bitch, bastard, slut and whore are also used.
So it turns out, the peeling of the skin from someone’s face that has been deemed as the reason why the game is being censored on the PlayStation consoles is just a small part of the mature content that is in the game.
After reading the detailed description, the game does offer a lot more, like cutting out a dead baby fetus from a corpse. This sounds way more sinister than the skin peeling part, which is quite bad on itself, to be honest. We haven’t played the game so we don’t know if the developers are just going for pure shock value, or if there is anything meaningful in making the game violent, but rest assured, it won’t be long until the game is out so everyone will have a chance to experience it themselves.
Martha Is Dead will be released on February 24, 2022, for the PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, and PC.
