IFDB page: Psyche’s Lament
Final placement: 21st place (of 36) in the 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition
Psyche’s Lament bills itself as “An Interactive Geek Myth”, which in the world of comp entries could either be a very amusing typo or a clever turn of phrase. Having played through the game, I’m convinced it’s the latter, because language and concept are strong suits here. The premise is that you play Psyche, who famously marries Cupid but is never allowed to see him. When her curiosity overcomes her and she lights a lamp in their bedroom, he flees and she must fulfill a series of seemingly impossible tasks set by Cupid’s mother, Venus. (The game substitutes Aphrodite, but Psyche’s story comes from a Roman source, not a Greek one. Or a geek one.)
The way the game sets up this story shows more cleverness, as Aphrodite gives Psyche her first task, counting out every seed from a huge heap:
As you come back to your senses, you see your mother-in-law (Aphrodite herself!)towering over your prone figure, sneering and slashing open a huge sack with a flick of her perfect nails. Where are you? What is she saying? It seems you’ll never leave this place until you can carry out an easy task: tell her how many seeds she just sent flying. The words seep through your mind as she storms out, leaving you alone to repent at leisure.
The words “repent at leisure” are well-chosen here, as they call to mind the second half of a saying that begins, “Marry in haste…” I’m not sure how much haste was involved in Psyche’s marriage, but its conditions clearly weren’t sustainable.
All in all, it’s a promising beginning! Unfortunately, things start to fall apart once the “geek” side of the story begins to express itself. This game wants to substitute mechanical devices for the more classical solutions Psyche finds to her problems, and while this approach is seemingly very well-suited to IF, it falls prey to numerous implementation issues.
First, the mechanical objects are described just a little too vaguely, and responses to interacting with them don’t really get to the heart of the matter either. For instance, there’s an object that’s supposed to fit into a slot, but the game’s description of that object gives no indication of its size. The way it was described, I was envisioning something in the nature of a bathroom scale, and when I tried to connect parts of it to the small object with the slot, I kept getting messages along the lines of “It’s too hard to hold the [part] steady in its current position.”
In hindsight, this was clearly trying to get me to put tab A in slot B, but between the vagueness of the object description and the vagueness of the failure message, that didn’t even register with me as a possibility, so I kept trying to steady things on the ground, et cetera, before finally consulting the walkthrough and discovering that in fact what I thought was like a bathroom scale was more like a credit card.
Then, once I’d gotten past that hurdle, I did some fiddly circuit assembly and came up with a machine that could count the seeds. Which, when I pressed “go”, it did… printing out ten lines of output for every seed! This was insane, but bizarre in a different way was the fact that there were only like 5 dozen seeds. Psyche could have counted them by hand much, much more easily than all the rigmarole she went through, and she should not have been intimidated by such a small pile to begin with.
A similar mechanical puzzle is at work for the second trial, and this one went even more wrong for me. I wired up another circuit, set it going, and… put the game into an endless loop! It went through over 300 iterations before I decided that it was never going to stop. This was a surprising new way for a game to become unwinnable, and while it was funny, it did not win Psyche’s Lament any points from me.
The last puzzle is the most bewildering of all, but it didn’t matter, because by this point I had fully lost trust in the game and was going straight from the walkthrough. I still appreciated getting to uncover little sparkles in the text, but on the whole I found it a disappointing experience, and wished that the game had stuck with a little more Greek (or Roman, even), a little less geek.
Rating: 4.1