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Review
(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?
