To do this, you basically have to manually move and frame what you need, or want, to take, put it in focus, get the right exposure and mess with the aperture, and add/change the camera’s accessories. You can take out the camera anytime (well, most of the time) to take a photo of anything you want any way you want to. These will require you to frame the photo in a specific way. There are certain points where the story will ask for you to take a photo, some side objections you can do will ask for photos, and there are some optional photos you can do to discover something (or to get an achievement). Before they do, you manage to grab it so you can use it throughout the game. Your father was meaning to gift you a new camera, a 1940 Rolleicord camera, but as they think you’re dead, well they don’t know what to do with it past returning it.
As the game is set in the 1940s, the game aimed to emulate how photography was done and developed during that time. One of the big aspects Martha is Dead brings, both in the narrative and just for you to play with, is its photography. It also does come to affect Giulia personally at certain points of the story and it’s heartbreaking. In addition, with this taking place during WW2, the war also serves as a backdrop as you will hear about it as you go through the story through newspaper articles and from the radio (and Martha’s death is also referenced to cause some conflict as well). Anyway, Giulia main mission is to find out who killed Martha, and she even goes down the route of tying it to the childhood folktale of The White Lady, and finding a way to mourn the loss in the meantime. Her parents don’t really stay around waiting for Martha to come down so Giulia doesn’t have any scenes being careful other than when she answers the phone, but she can still hear when someone is talking about her or Martha.
There is also some hint that part of the decision was a selfish one, so Giulia can get the same affection that Martha got.Īs Martha was deaf and blind, Giulia now has to pretend she is too and it’s not good being able to hear how her mother puts her down while thinking she is Martha. To make her mother think that she, Giulia, died and not Martha as she knows her mother can live with Giulia dying than her favorite Martha. Remembering that her mother loves Martha the most, she makes a decision to pretend to be Martha after her mother thinks she is Martha. She decides to go find out what exactly it is and upon doing so, she discovers that it’s Martha. She finds something floating in the lake, which suspiciously looks a lot like a body. She does catch something on the camera, but it wasn’t what she wanted. One day, Giulia went down to the lake behind their house to set up some cameras to hopefully catch something. Their mother never could tell them apart, but their father was able to (despite being mainly absent). She is the daughter of a German soldier and she has a twin sister named Martha, who is deaf and blind. Taking place in 1944 Italy, on the tail end of WW2, you are put into the mind of Giulia.