LKA’s follow-up to The Town Of Light begins with a strong disclaimer warning you of distressing scenes to come, but one moment in particular sends a chill down our spine. This involuntary shudder comes shortly after we gain access to a rotary phone in a downstairs corridor of the family home, a villa in the Tuscan countryside. Beside it is a list of numbers to dial, but with little reason to do so, we wander off to explore our surroundings. Then we stumble upon another note and, upon examining it, mutter aloud in horror: it’s a diegetic bit of tutorial text explaining how to use a rotary phone.

We’re half-joking, of course (although this does serve as an exemplar of the game’s ‘show and tell, and then tell some more’ approach to its story). By now, you will surely be aware that Martha Is Dead has become something of a cause célèbre, certainly for a game of its relatively low profile. This is the game whose physical release on PlayStation had to be delayed because Sony demanded cuts to certain scenes – ironically, since the first of these involves the grisliest cut of all, as playercharacter Giulia drags the corpse of her drowned sister from a lake, prompting a sequence in which you squeeze triggers to slice her face off in lingering close-up before thumbing both analogue sticks to pull it free and don it as a mask. Even the recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot mostly left that one to the viewer’s imagination.