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After hours of investigation and several harrowing experiences, players might find themselves wondering what the hell just happened as the credits roll for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Martha Is Dead. From the moment Giulia confronts Irene in the basement, everything goes far off the rails. We're left questioning everything that the game has shown us to that point and unable to fully trust anything after.
We've gone through all the evidence the game presents to piece together the truth. The ending is purposely vague, and not everything adds up completely. The final conversation in the game even asks the player what they think really happened - what's your take?
Major Spoilers for Martha Is Dead Begin Here
The Final Sequence
After att💮empting to piece together her lost memories via the puppet theatre, Giulia phones her priest Don Attilio for help. He encourages her to come to stay with him, so he can keep her safe from the Allied bombing and get her help.
Upon entering the church, Giulia's perspective changes to a dreamlike environment filled with marionettes instead of people. Most likely at Irene's request, Don Attilio had psychiatric hospital staff waiting to take Giulia into their care. After listening to a narrated account of her treatment, the player has a conversation with Giulia's reflection in a mirror, also in the form of a marionette.
While you can choose your responses to the mirror's questions, it quickly becomes clear - if it wasn't already - that some or all of the game's events only occurred in Giulia's head.
While it's impossible to say for sure what really happened, two scenarios stand out as the most plausible. Each has plenty of evidence for and against it, and ultimately the truth is what the player chooses to believe.
The Family And Their Fate
First off, let's take a look at the things we can be reasonably sure truly happened. Irene had a difficult pregnancy and childbirth with Martha and Giulia, which left her infertile and weak. To treat her symptoms, she was prescribed a German drug called Pervitin - otherwise known as methamphetamine. Irene probably wasn't a particularly good person to begin with (remember, she married a Nazi officer), but the side effects of the meth addiction she developed led her to violently lash out at her children - Giulia in particular.
The trauma causes Martha to become both deaf and mute (a condition she later reveals she faked for fifteen years), while 𒉰Giulia simply represses the🌠 terrible memories of her treatment at the hands of Irene.
Shortly before the game begins, Giulia and Martha each enter a sexual relationship with their friend Lapo without the other's knowledge. Both become pregnant. Unable to cope with her guilt from the pregnancy and from being Irene's favorite, Martha resolves to pretend to be Giulia and provoke Irene into killing her, allowing the real Giulia to take Martha's identity as the beloved child. She leaves a letter for Irene telling her to come to the lake at dawn, where she will reveal her pregnancy as "Giulia" with the expectation that Irene will react violently.
While Giulia suspects that it was Irene who killed Martha - and it is possible that she did - this is the least likely scenario. When Giulia listens to the recording of her confrontation with her mother, it's important to note that Irene's response to being told at gunpoint to confess what she's done is to admit she is having Giulia committed to an institution.
If she had actually murdered her own daughter, that would probably have been the first thing to come to her mind instead. It is possible, however, that Irene is just as mentally ill as Giulia and blocked out the murder herself, but as with everything in this game, we can't be sure.
Throughout Giulia's investigation into Martha's death, Lapo is killed in a fight with German soldiers. Giulia suffers a miscarriage of her own pregnancy and eventually murders her mother when she finds out Irene intends to have her committed. Finally, communist partisans storm the house, killing Erich and beating Giulia within an inch of her life.
Giulia Killed Martha Theory
In this telling, most of the game's events played out as they were presented to the player. Giulia arrives at the lake before Irene, which forces Martha to reveal her plan. This causes Giulia to black out, during which time she kills Martha - possibly over her relationship with Lapo, or possibly over anger that Martha never consulted her on the plan. Whatever her reasons, Giulia comes to and takes her nature photographs unaware that anything happened.
Unable to remember the fight, Giulia takes Martha's letter at face value and suspects Irene killed Martha as intended. It's only after she kills Irene and develops the final photograph that she discovers what she did.
This is the narrative that most of the game supports, but after Giulia's discovery and the attack by the partisans, the entire story is thrown into question. The recording of Irene's confession and the second puppet theater sequence both suggest that Giulia's psyche is even more fragmented than was first suspected.
Martha Never Existed Theory
After the partisan attack, Giulia returns to the puppet theater in an attempt to piece together her missing childhood memories. In this version of events, Irene only gave birth to one baby - Giulia - rather than twins. When Giulia is five or six years old, Irene beats her badly with a cane. This experience leads Giܫulia to create an alternate persona, Martha, who can neither hear nor speak.
Giulia internally writes off anything that she feels pain or shame about as having happened to Martha instead. It seems that Irene encouraged this as a means to keep little Giulia from disturbing her, telling the child to go and play with her "sister." Giulia's parents even went so far as to give the two personalities their own beds and wardrobes.
After a particularly devastating incident where an enraged Irene kills Giulia's dog and feeds it to her, the child is sent to live with her nanny at the villa for three years. Presumably, Irene ♛received treatment for her own illness during this time, and the Martha persona eventually became dormant.
After becoming pregnant with Lapo's baby, Giulia's sense of guilt causes Martha to resurface. As Martha, she develops the plan to provoke Irene into killing her, "protecting" Giulia from the shame she feels. When Irene finds the letter she becomes worried, as the Martha personality hasn't appeared in years. She goes to the lake and, finding that Giulia will not speak, believes Martha has become the dominant personality. A few days later, Giulia suffers a miscarriage. We later see a bottle of Pervitin pills in Martha's trinket box - these may be the cause.
Giulia's condition deteriorates rapidly over the next week, and she harms herself in front of the piano - something she internally tells herself Irene did. Fearing for Giulia's safety and seeing no other option, Irene arranges to have Giulia sent to an asylum. When Giulia finds out, she shoots and dismembers Irene during another blackout.
While this version makes the most sense in the context of the game's final sequence and is mostly consistent in a second playthrough if we assume that Giulia is making most of the story up, it's worth noting that the evidence against Martha's existence only appears after Giulia develops the photo of the murder. It is possible that, as a response to discovering she killed her own twin sister, Giulia created a new narrative in which Martha never existed, absolving herself from any guilt - after all, how can she have killed someone who isn't real?
