Martha is Dead's plummet is hard to pin on an exact moment since you won't know how empty a reveal is until the entire narrative massacre is complete, but it is likely to have begun with one of two scenes. The more damaging and inexplicable one is perhaps the revelation that Martha is not deaf, she had been faking it for years for little reason and that makes the intriguing imposter syndrome angle of trying to imitate your sister feel hollow. The other though leads to some of the incredible confusion over how the story terminates. When Martha is Dead begins it is presented as an interview with Giulia and she has noticeable scars on her face, this coming from a torture scene where she is injured and her father killed. After the text only scene ends you may notice the curious fact your father's corpse isn't present nor is there much sign of the torture in the room despite it being quite brutal, but you do have those scars in the interview segment that suggest it did happen.

Well, it is quite likely the torture didn't happen, but also, it's likely not much of anything happened, because you start to receive more explicit confirmations or suggestions that certain things never occurred or existed. One of those things? Martha herself. It starts to be heavily implied your twin sister is a figment of your imagination, which makes some earlier scenes even more confusing since there is a period of the game where you try and succeed in proving you weren't the one who killed your sister only to later learn you probably killed your sister who probably doesn't exist. That then raises the question of what the funeral in your home is about, what people thought about you pretending to be Martha, and a range of other details, but in the game's final moments, Martha is Dead almost tries to absolve itself of needing to make sense of it. You're asked a series of questions of what you think happened, if you think Martha is real for example, and the game won't tell you if you're right or wrong, but by pretending it is open to interpretation, it probably hoped to shirk responsibility since a multiple choice ending with no concrete details means it's hard to confirm anything was real and thus how can you object when you potentially didn't "figure it out"?

In the review I made mention of the puppet show, which contains a strange and outright ludicrous situation where Giulia's mother gets tired of the yapping dog and boils it in front of her before feeding it to her immediately after. The puppets dull some of the impact but it is already almost cartoonishly evil in its concept, although the game's most ridiculous moment in how egregiously gratuitous the violence is remains something I probably won't type here despite its purpose withering away as the act ultimately feels pointless. The dog boiling already comes after you've started to doubt pretty much everything you're presented with so it doesn't even feel like some valid source for a lifelong mental break, but it does feel like the game would be happy to say that Martha is Dead is some elaborate fantasy being shared in this interview at the psychiatric ward. This is no Life of Pi situation where you might be getting a fantastical spin on real events though, our narrator here is unreliable to the point it might as well be made up nonsense. Even if it is all some delusion brought upon by trauma, it takes it to such inexplicable extremes that almost everything must be a hallucination to justify the framework it's built upon. If the game had clipped out much of what happened after either the reveal about Martha or the torture sequence then it is possible there would be something salvageable despite technical problems and some bland activities. Instead, it feels like you're either going to paint it with a dismissive brush of it all being in Giulia's head or at best you might actually gasp at the reveals because you don't stop to try and figure out what it means for the flimsy story structure that can't support itself after the swerves.