Alternative title: Speak of the devil: a …lamp… ramble.
Hi hi! Naarel here. Ectocomp 2025 just opened- oh. Oh it’s done already? I started the postmortem when it just opened- I won La Petite Mort? Oh. Oh! Thank you! I didn’t expect that.
Obviously, if you haven’t played the lamp… yet, please do so before you read this post because there are spoilers in there. Got it? Okay, thank you. Also, I will be discussing religion, specifically Christianity, so if that’s something you’re unwilling to read about, see you somewhere else. Now, onto the post, which I divided into collapsible parts because gods know it’s probably longer than the lamp… itself.
1. background
I was meant to enter 2025 Ectocomp with Sheoltorn, a longer work which would be all about this one girl being brought back to life by her alchemist friend after she dies a tragic death. However, I realized I massively overscoped and it’d not be a viable idea at all with how much time I have left. Last year, I had to delete many scenes and parts from my entry since I also overscoped, and it led to me being unable to resolve some plot elements in a way that’d be fully satisfying for me. I wanted to avoid it this time so I decided to shelve Sheoltorn, at least for now, and instead opted to make something new. By that point, I was tired, so I decided it’d be best if I gave up on the LGG category (for my non-IF friends reading this, it’s Le Grand Guignol, for games written in more than 4h with no time limit) and switched to LPM (La Petite Mort, for games made in 4h or less). You might be wondering: Naarel, how the fuck is making a game in 4h only less tiring than taking your time with something? To which I’ll say, you know, it’s only 4h, I can just vibe through it.
My initial idea was to make a bit of trans horror which I won’t elaborate on since I might make it in the future. This, however, has proven itself to be emotionally exhausting, especially since it was meant to have a bad ending, which would be disastrous for my mental health at the time. Then again, I had no other ideas back then, so I planned to do it anyway.
Except, a friend mentioned something in a conversation, and this made me think of something I went through in the past. See, back when I was just a sociology student (good old times…), there was this one girl who couldn’t stop staring at me. I caught her doing this regularly and I swear to gods, I cannot recall her eye color because of how massive her pupils were. She occupied quite a bit of my brain at the time and for a long while, I could only piece together some clues about her. Everyone has that one person in class or in group that is a complete mystery, right? Well, in real life, I ended up talking to her and we got along pretty well. She’s actually the T. from the credits. (T., if you’re reading this by any miracle, thank you and I’m sorry.)
Either way, I knew what I wanted to do.
2. what's in the eye?
I knew that I wanted to have a Mystery Girl in there — that nameless, strange entity that just stares at the protagonist with her huge black eyes. I feel like this in itself is already strange and unsettling enough. There were, naturally, many routes I could’ve gone with, and I liked none of them. Vampire craving MC’s blood so badly her eyes dilute like she’s a cat? Mmm, I mean, okay, but what’d stop an ancient creature from simply draining this lonely student like a Caprisun? Nothing, really. There’s the obvious yandere stalker route and such but I didn’t want to go for it, as it feels a little cliché, not to mention, I firmly believe in yandere stories being more grounded in the emotional layer and I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off in a way that’d satisfy me in just 4h. That, and the fact that I wanted to explore something supernatural rather than a horror that could happen in real life. Mystery Girl could also be an entity of her own but I already like to write about Mystery Girls and I wanted to try something different.
I started thinking about the act of staring and how we perceive the eyes. I mean, aren’t we always told about the importance of eye contact? Isn’t removing or altering the way the eyes look one of the simplest ways to make a picture of someone instantly creepy? Isn’t giving a character an unusual eye color a common way to indicate that someone is strange, different, possibly not human? Now, that was an interesting thing. What’s in the eye?
While trying to find some inspiration, I naturally started doing some mild research, and during my searching, I found a Bible quote that ended up being the title. Luke 11:34 says: "Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness." It’s reprised in Matthew 6:22-23, which goes: "The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!"
Now, that wouldn’t be the first time of me pulling my title from a Bible quote. In fact, I used a quote from Matthew 6 (specifically, Matthew 6:3) as the title and inspiration for my last year’s Ectocomp project, do not let your left hand know. One of the parts of my personal lore is that I used to be very Catholic and it was something that changed the course of my life, mostly for the worse, since it ended up throwing me right into some issues I still struggle with more than a decade later. Since that struggle is still a part of me, I like to take inspiration from religion and adjacent themes as means of reclaiming the power it used to have over me.
I read a couple of commentaries. I probably messed something up with the interpretation but I don’t think I care that much about theological accuracy. A human being is supposed to live by the word of God and is made in God’s image, and y’know, since God is Light, and the Light is good, it’s only logical that there should be Light in your soul. A lamp brings the light into the dark room, and all of our souls are dark at first because of the Original Sin, therefore, the eyes we set on God serve as a lamp for the body, bringing the Light inside. Does that make any sense? If it doesn’t, don’t worry, it’s not hugely relevant to the game anyway.
I posed myself a question: if your eyes were really an indicator of how “bright” your soul is, who would have big, dark eyes?
3. that part where I talk about The Devil (in general)
Disclaimer: I will be capitalizing “Devil” throughout this postmortem (and I will be using Devil for Satan/Lucifer/the main bad guy as well, for reasons). If it’s not capitalized, I mean a type of a being. You’ll see what I mean. Also, I’m speaking about the Christian (possibly Catholic-specific) interpretation of the Devil, particularly because this is what it’s all based around and what I’m most knowledgeable about.
Everyone knows the Devil, right? Horns, pitchfork, sometimes hooves, bat wings, a goatee, red skin. The main bad guy. The one you can blame all the bad things on. Father of lies, the betrayer, the adversary, you know what’s the deal with that.
In case you didn’t know it already (somehow), I’m Polish. Back in the day, as Christianization of the nation progressed, many of the spirits from the old Slavic system of beliefs got conflated with the devils. This conflation resulted in a pretty interesting thing: stories where devils are more like your classic fae, or trickster spirits of some sort, and sometimes, this makes them helpful. In some stories I’ve read, the devils were even allied with the poor, helping them by supplying them with flour or making sure their cows give enough milk. In one story I read, a devil prevents a man from stealing (!) from the church (!!) by giving him gold a recently deceased priest (!!!) refused to give to the poor, and not only that, he also bailed the man out once a nobleman imprisoned him for “stealing”.
Now, you might ask “wouldn’t it be more devil-like to let the man steal from the church?”, which is a valid question. Many people see devils as creatures who crave immediate gratification and will push you into immediate sin. What this thought forgets is that often the devils (and the Devil) can be enforcers of deals and lovers of a more subtle strategy. Stealing from a church is one sin, and while it might be a “gateway drug” for more sins, this guy might be careful with how he spends the money he got, or might have trouble selling/smelting the golden cross. Making one man rich overnight in mysterious circumstances can set off a cascade of sins due to greed and envy. It guarantees that the guy has money he doesn’t feel guilty about having, so, he might be less careful about spending it, alerting everyone to his newfound suspicious wealth. Also, the priest promised he’ll give the gold away and he never did that (he actually ate the gold so nobody can get it, his corpse spat it out basically), therefore, the devil there made sure the deal is done all the way through. Also also, if the devil here is just a lil trickster, he just wants chaos and that’s all, and Christian devil standards aren’t really a concern.
I don’t believe in the Devil, not anymore at least, but I don’t like the portrayal which has him as the guy who screams “DO A SIN” in your ear. Even in the Bible itself, he seems like a slightly subtler creature, one that loves to exploit human nature. In case of Job, he never speaks to Job himself, and instead, aims to make him turn away from God by inflicting a variety of misfortunes on him, with God’s permission. In case of the Original Sin, he doesn’t say “eat the apple, it’s bad for you and it’ll really piss God off lmao”, he says that it grants wisdom and would make humans on the same level as God. When he tempted Jesus in the desert, he still tried to exploit his human nature (note: again, I am coming from the Catholic theology standpoint, and the Catholic stance is that Jesus has two natures, divine and human): the need for food, need for safety, and need for power. My favorite example is when he incites David to… take a census. This isn’t a sin in any way, shape, or form… but God still gets angry and David apologizes for it, then gets to choose what punishment he’ll receive for this. It might be confusing to read at first: why would God get angry at David for doing something which is a reasonable thing for a ruler to do? Well… because it’d be fuel for his pride. The census would count all of the soldiers he had available and it’d boost his ego to unimaginable levels. Taking a census isn’t a sin but what follows seeing the numbers is.
So, if I were to write the Devil, I wouldn’t write him to be a mindless “WOULDN’T SIN BE FUN” type people love him to be. No, I needed something less obvious.
4. that part where I talk about The Devil (in game)
I said before that a part of it all was inspired by my own encounter with a girl who was staring at me. The Devil in the lamp… is, obviously, not her, just so we’re clear, just because I don’t like basing my characters on one person. However, I need to say, one of the main things about her was that she was fairly openly Catholic, and this was the start of a specific thought process for me.
The thing is, the Bible states clearly that demons also believe in God (James 2:19, actually referenced in the game). I mean, it’d be hard for them not to, considering that they used to be angels once, and they were created specifically to serve God. I started thinking a lot about the performative Christianity which hides something sinister underneath. There’s quite a lot of faith people can put in someone who seems to be devout — sometimes more than they put in actual God himself. There’s a lot to be said here about cults and their leaders, about corrupted clergy, about public figures suddenly finding Jesus after a giant controversy. Isn’t this using the outward display of faith to mask sin? Why wouldn’t the literal Devil do this as well?
So, you know, it just felt somewhat right to make the Devil here wear a cross (mind you, not a crucifix, as that’d be different) and be proficient with theological discourse to the point of debating people on it. A common thread between many groups uniting ex-religious people is that they like to emphasize how learning more about their religion, even through reading their holy texts, was what pushed them away from their faith, so the vision of the Devil poking holes in your understanding to make you doubt makes a lot of sense to me.
I thought about the Devil being a woman here, not just because of the fact that she was meant to be the Mystery Girl, but also because of how angels are meant to work in Catholic framework. See, angels are spiritual creatures, not physical ones. Humans and all other animals have sexes because they are physical and they are meant to reproduce. Angels weren’t created with that in mind, therefore, they’re asexual (in the “having no biological sex” way) and agender. They’re often referred to with he/him pronouns and called “men” or “sons of God”, but this is simply them taking on a form that will be understood by a human. Since the Devil used to be an angel, I extrapolated genderlessness onto them. The devils of Polish folklore were often shapeshifters, as trickster deities tend to be, and so, why wouldn’t the Devil be able to switch their appearance as well? Why is the Devil even a guy all the time? It’s 2025, we can have a woman Devil.
I didn’t want to describe her a lot and I didn’t have the time to do so anyway, and I think that’s for the better. The main detail of her weird black eyes is meant to be the focus. However, I allowed myself to have some fun with some visuals.
“all I can think about is the glint of the silver cross on her neck, hanging over her pitch black sweater, shining like a star in the night sky” — I thought this would be a funny comparison because, well, you know, stars? Morning Star? One of Lucifer’s names? Okay, maybe it’s mildly funny only for me, I’m sorry.
She unzips her [red] coat; now it really looks like a cartoonish king’s cape with all that white fur near her neck. — continuing with the Lucifer thing, his main sin was, according to many interpretations, self-deification. You know that whole “Christ is king” talk? Here you have the literal Devil being perceived as a somewhat silly, childish imitation of a real king. Is it an intentional move she made to mock all of this or is this just a really bitter, ironic coincidence? Up to you, honestly.
Either way, I might write more with this particular Devil in the future, just because I was told this might be a good idea. I wonder if I can still keep the vibe in a different work. Well, we’re not talking about a different work now, though. Getting back to the lamp…
5. mechanics of temptation (the plot? sort of, kind of?)
I’ll be honest with you, I just wanted to put two characters together and see what happens. On one hand, a Mystery Girl who’s literally the Devil, on the other, an apathetic uni student who’s so unimportant in the grand scheme of things that they don’t even get a name. There is an outline I wrote for this one, of course, but it mostly focused on the points I wanted to reach. Some reviewers noticed that it seems to follow the temptations Jesus endured while in the desert and it was a very intentional reference. As I explained, I see those as a very neat attempt at exploiting human nature… the problem is: the protagonist is just human. I couldn’t write the Devil going “just conjure yourself some food” or “jump down, I swear it won’t hurt” because the protagonist would probably just think “okay, this person is detached from reality”.
One of the themes in Polish tales about devils is the “servant devil” — a devil which is willing to help you in a variety of ways… for a price. The earthly life is filled with anything you would’ve ever wanted, under the condition that one day, your soul will be taken straight to hell. That’s the angle I wanted to go with. The protagonist is a lonely, unimportant person who clearly doesn’t have anything thrilling going on in their life, until this one thing that’s clearly new, strange, possibly supernatural, comes. A Polish saying goes: ciekawość to pierwszy stopień do piekła, or, curiosity is the first step to hell. What the Devil did there was, basically, giving the protagonist a tiny sample of what a different, more exciting life could look like. No hunger, the thrill of dangerous decisions with no drawbacks… and, perhaps, company of someone who seems interested in you. Just a taste of something better, a bite from the forbidden fruit, y’know?
There was one thing that I wanted to write but didn’t make it to the script for a variety of reasons I didn’t want to get into: the Devil admitting that she knows she’s “The Great Loser”. After all, Satan has to be destroyed and everyone knows it’s inevitable, from Christian point of view at least. You know that moment in which Jesus cries “God, why have you forsaken me?”? It’s this really intense moment, a tiny moment of crisis in the face of death. And if Jesus himself can have a moment like that, a lesser creature might as well. Throughout this whole story, I imagined the Devil in a crisis: someone who knows exactly what fate awaits them and knows that there’s no way to undo it because that’s simply what has to happen. From Catholic standpoint at least, the one and only question presented in the lamp…, which is “Can the Devil repent?”, has only one answer: no. The will of angels isn’t like the will of a human being; a human can always turn back but an angel’s decision is always final.
This is not to imply that the Devil here has any real desire to change her wicked ways. All of this is more fear than any noble goal or need for redemption. There’s a reason why she tells the protagonist that their belief in the Devil’s possible repentance is sweet but naïve (if that’s the path you choose). I guess I just wanted to put together two characters who are stuck and don’t believe anything can change, and perhaps, don’t want anything to change. So you have the tempter (well, temptress technically, but that word gets weirdly sexual connotations in its feminine form, wonder why) in crisis and a person so apathetic that no temptation can really work on them.
6. some rapid fire stuff
Listen, I’ve been working on writing this thing for practically a month now. It’s probably longer than the work itself. I’m tired of formatting it and making sure my thoughts are coherent, and rechecking the legends, and opening up the Bible and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and just in general, let’s finish this thing and leave it behind. Some rapid fire stuff that I didn’t know where to put but I feel the need to specify.
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What was in the coffee cups? The answer is that I can’t tell you what it is because I don’t know either but I know exactly what it tastes like and what’s the texture like because my brain works like that. It contains amounts of caffeine which are lethal for a normal human being. Extremely velvety and thick, with a strong black coffee taste. If you took a sip (somehow), you wouldn’t be able to properly swallow it (too thick). It just kinda feels like having a snake slither down your throat and then your heart gives out.
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This isn’t said outright but the action is taking place in Warsaw. The uni library is the University of Warsaw Library, which allows you to enter the roof (though it wouldn’t be possible in specific months, so I guess that’s another twisted miracle of the Devil). The sociology department building is specifically the one on Karowa street (though people there were washing their cups…). There is a reference to people drinking by the river, and of course that river is Vistula, 'cause what else could it be, and of course, it’s a classic destination for bonding students.
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It’s specified that the Devil is drinking Liebsfraumilch, which Wikipedia helpfully translates as “Our Lady’s Milk”, the Lady in question being, of course, Mary, mother of Jesus. If you ever saw that blue bottle then you also knows it has a depiction of her with baby Jesus on it. It’s both a reference to the fact that it’s quite popular with drinking students and just a very ironic thing that I smirked over.
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There’s this one part in which the Devil puts her hand in the water and it turns red, and there’s this metallic smell in the air, all of that. This is a reference to all the three billion times water turned to blood in the Bible but also the whole scene is kiiiiind of a speedrun of the Seven Bowls of God’s Wrath (Revelations 16); water turning to blood (“A red cloud (…) spreads further and further, coloring the water. The air smells like metal" and “The third angel poured out his bowl on the rivers and springs of water, and they became blood” ), scorching heat (”…the river is boiling away…" and “…the sun was allowed to scorch people with fire. They were seared by the intense heat…"), the darkness kind of (”…crimson fumes rise up, up, covering the sky, covering the landscape…" and “…[the beast’s] kingdom was plunged into darkness”), and the drying of Euphrates, which Vistula certainly is not, but it is kinda the most important river there so close enough I guess (“…the riverbed is dry soon after…” and “…[the great river Euphrates’] water was dried up…”). The bones and swords are just a reference to the fact that we keep seeing more and more artifacts like this whenever Vistula dries up. Global warming and all.
So, conclusions, further plans, all of that:
Once more, thank you to everyone who playtested, played, rated, commented, reviewed, and helped me win. I don’t feel like I really deserved to get that high of a place but it’s Sunday evening and you can never trust what you’re thinking about yourself on a Sunday evening. I still need to fix that one word I omitted in the text but gods know I don’t feel like doing it today.
I know I’ll see you next year on another Ectocomp for sure. With what? That I’m not sure about. Maybe I’ll finish Sheoltorn. Maybe I’ll finally make trans horror. Maybe you’ll get another single-choice kinda-folklore-inspired modern setting with paranormal characteristics story with a title taken from Matthew 6 because gods know I could do it thrice. Maybe I’ll just spin the wheel and decide in the last days of September 2026. I just know I’ll be there with you and I hope you will be waiting.
If you still have any impressions you’d like to share or questions you’d want to ask, go ahead. See you soon,
Naarel