Play Kleidí: The Lamp of Psyche — a free find-the-key maze game of Greek myth, in your browser

A free browser find-the-key maze game built on Greek myth. Eros' lamp has shattered and its light is scattered through Aphrodite's thirty sealed rooms — gather every shard, take the key, and open the door. Ad-free, no download.

Kleidí: The Lamp of Psyche is a free browser-based find-the-key maze game built on Greek myth, and it is played one sealed room at a time. Eros fled Aphrodite's palace before dawn and left his lamp burning on the sill. When Psyche reached for it the flame went out — not blown out, taken — and the light broke into shards that fell through the floor of the house like coins through a grate. Aphrodite, who had arranged the whole night, gave her four trials and thirty locked rooms: in each one she must gather every shard, take the key the light reveals, and open the door.

What makes this more than a maze is that the maze is read, not rushed. Every room is a single screen with a fixed patrol, a fixed set of gates and a key that does not exist until the lamp is whole — so the puzzle is the order you do things in, not how fast you can press a key. There are no timers and nothing chases you. The shades walk a route they will walk again, and the fourth beat of every four is mist. Thirty rooms across four acts — the ivory palace, the sun-meadow, the gorge of the Styx, and the dark house below the house — with a move par that was measured by a solver running the very engine your finger uses.

How to play

1. Walk one tile at a time. Arrow keys, WASD, a swipe on the board, the on-screen pad, or a tap on a far tile — Psyche will take the shortest walk she can see.
2. Collect every shard. A shard is picked up by walking onto it. The counter in the header shows how many the room holds.
3. Take the key. When the last shard is collected, Kleidí appears on the board. It does nothing until then, which is the point.
4. Open the door. The door refuses you until you carry the key. Stepping into it finishes the room.
5. Gates and sigils. A gate blocks one tile of the only path. Its sigil is always placed on the near side, so a gate can cost you a detour but never the room.
6. Slabs and runes. A pressure rune opens the slab tied to it permanently. The slab is always somewhere you have already walked past.
7. Shades. Each shade walks a fixed loop, one tile per beat. It is solid on three beats and mist on the fourth. Wait with Space to change your beat.
8. Mirrors. Two mirrors are one door. Step into either and you come out of the other.

Controls

The rules, exactly

Find-the-key maze, labyrinth and escape room

The four acts of the campaign

Why par is a number you can trust

Every room shows a par, and it is measured rather than invented. A room is built from a fixed seed, then the same engine the game runs on searches for the shortest winning walk — every shard, the key, the door, with gates, slabs and the shade beat respected — and the room is rejected if no such walk exists. Par is that walk's length. The test suite then replays the walk through the player-facing move function, one tile at a time, and compares the two counts; it also follows the in-game hint from the start of every room to the door to prove the hint cannot lead you into a wall.

The story, briefly

Aphrodite's jealousy is the engine of the story and the lamp is its clock. Psyche is given the four tasks every schoolbook knows — the seeds, the golden wool, the flask from the Styx, the box from the underworld — but the game stages them as rooms rather than cutscenes. The palace is ivory and lamplit; the meadow is amber and watched; the gorge is wet black stone that presses underfoot; the house below the house has no light at all and a floor that remembers your steps. She opens the box, of course. What comes out is not a curse but a sleep, and it is Eros who wakes her.

Strategy that actually works

• Read the whole room before the first step. The shard count, the gate colours and the key's corner tell you the order; the walking is the easy part.
• Take the sigil before you need it. A gate is only expensive if you meet it first and have to walk back.
• Count the beat. Three solid, one mist. If a shade is between you and a shard, step on the fourth beat, not the first.
• Use the key's position. It sits at the far end of the room, so the last shard is usually on the way there.
• Tap, don't walk. A tap on a far tile walks the shortest path; use it while you think about the next order.
• Save hints for the dark house. One hint costs nothing but a star — spend it where you cannot see.

Technical notes

Everything here is generated: no image is loaded, no audio file is played, no third-party script runs. The floor, the walls, the shards, the shades, the sigils and the door are Canvas 2D, drawn from the same seeded room data the solver uses; sound is synthesised with the Web Audio API at the moment it is needed. Progress and stars live in your own browser under kleidi.save.v1; nothing is uploaded, because there is no server. The campaign suite rebuilds all thirty rooms from their seeds and asserts the contract before anything ships: every room is solvable, par equals a fresh solve, par equals a replay through the player's own move function, every sigil is on the near side of its gate, and every shade patrol is on the floor.

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