the lamp of your body

This is a compelling, well-crafted short story with limited interactivity, written as speed IF, which means it's even better.

Worth noting up top: This game deals with religious themes, which is something I know very little about. And I’m gonna spoil the game in a minute.

At first this felt like a familiar story of a girl who has her eye on you in class being more...complex than you expected. In fact, that’s how I remember reading it when I first played, during Ectocomp last year. I felt sympathy for her, being continually spurned, and the final choice was easy: yes, the devil can repent. By the end I believed it was possible.

This time around I was more intrigued by the protagonist. Why are they so blasé about the possibly supernatural classmate who no one knows anything about? If their life is as lacking as it seems to be, why aren’t they at least a little bit tempted by power, money, knowledge?

It felt unusual that this devil was more interested in the random mortal who probably never has anything interesting happen to them than vice versa. Perhaps it’s rare to encounter someone who’s so empty that there’s nothing they want more than to be leveled with as an equal (“All I ever wanted was your name”). There’s definitely biblical lore here I’m missing, so instead I thought back to my younger days, when I spent a lot of time with people who didn’t value their own souls. (“You really don’t know what you’re worth, do you?” she says, and every high school crush flashes before my eyes.)

Anyway, this time the final choice was just as clear: no. Even this devil can’t try to be good.

The really cool thing about this game is that the protagonist arrives at a similar conclusion no matter which choice you (they) make. They had no real agency. As a reader, with an encounter like this, of course that’s how it ends. And a story that enthralls without surprise is doubly impressive.

(Spoilers for this short game, which is very much worth a play).

About a third of the way through the lamp of your body, I squinted at the screen and alt-tabbed into my notes file. The game had been grabby enough from the beginning, with a narrator realizing that there’s a strange woman with unearthly eyes in one of his classes who keeps staring at him, leading to an early, memorable hallucination:

And then, her pupil ruptures. It spills out like an undercooked yolk, all over the whites of her eyes. I need to look away but I can’t. It’s hypnotic, the way the darkness takes over, slowly, slowly, and pools on her waterline. I’m holding my breath, waiting for it to overflow and splash on the table.

I remained intrigued as the narrator’s investigation into her identity kept coming up short, stymied by one uncanny barrier about another, before actually engaging in some direct but enigmatic conversations, but wasn’t quite sure where the game was going with all this. Then, after a snafu with the protagonist’s financial aid means they’re having to skip meals until the next check arrives, the woman says she can get them something to eat; the protagonist demurs, but nevertheless, the next time they open their fridge, rather than just having a few sad eggs it’s stuffed to the gills. This is the point at which I switched to my notes and wrote “hmm with the food in the fridge, are these riffs on the temptations in the desert?”

Then I clicked to the next passage, and laughed out loud when I saw that it started “we’re standing on the roof of our uni library…”

The lesson I suppose is that you can take the boy out of the Catholic church, I guess, but you can’t take the Catholic church out of the boy, even three decades on. In fairness, the itch page literally says “run temptation” when you start the game, which is a detail I’d forgotten until just now but probably subconsciously primed me to recognize what was going on. The fact that the protagonist attends the kind of school where there are electives about the apocrypha is also a reasonably direct prompt.

Still, for all that the parallels are rather clear, and the protagonist’s increasingly apocalyptic visions leave little doubt about the demonic nature of their interlocutor, the lamp of your body isn’t a clangingly obvious allegory by any means. While the basic arc of the story matches what’s in the gospels, the major difference here is that the protagonist doesn’t appear to be supernaturally chosen or even all that special. While the devil’s rationale for trying to corrupt Jesus are obvious, the motivation behind all the special attention the woman showers on the protagonist remains obscure, and it’s a testament to the quality of the game’s writing, grounded yet philosophically rich, that I couldn’t help turning that question over and over in my mind.

Is it just a matter of trying to collect one more soul, as Satan clocks through yet another workday in an eternity of trying to make quota? I don’t think so; the woman appears genuinely obsessed with the protagonist, and her offer of temptation after temptation seems less the calculating stratagem of a great deceiver, and more the only recourse of someone who knows no other way of engaging with another mind. In fact, the climactic moment of the game, the one choice that’s offered to the player, hinges on the woman asking whether the protagonist thinks the devil is inherently evil, or if they have the freedom to try to repent – and the woman seems sincerely invested in what they say.

Of course, maybe it’s all an act, with the question serving as the last temptation: while the protagonist demurs at all the woman’s other offers of aid or power, this is the one you, the player, can say yes to, and if you do, your eyes start to turn black just like hers. But even if you say no, while the woman disappears, the protagonist is still haunted by her absence, a black shadow always lurking at the corner of their eye: “I don’t know if it’s because I’m blessed or cursed,” they muse, “maybe there never was a difference.” The game’s title is an allusion to a verse in Matthew: “if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.” If our perceptions are clear, and we see things the way they truly are, in other words, we will be illuminated, but if our perceptions are clouded, we will be dragged into darkness. But isn’t it tempting to think that just maybe, it’s the other way around?

This was a choice-based mostly linear game that was longer than most of the Petite Mort games. It builds up background and has one choice at the end. I didn’t encounter any bugs and the style/polish looked good.

The story is about a girl in your college class with eyes like black pools. She unsettles you, and seems to be aware of that fact. Soon, you end up meeting with her, and learning more about her.

To avoid spoiling the game’s twists, I’ll put the rest of my impressions in spoilers:

Overall, pretty thought-provoking. I even sketched a doodle of the main NPC. The prose was the highlight.