The Eye of Borrack

I have a soft spot for the tiny Steam page that nobody covers, and The Eye of Borrack is about as quietly tucked away as they come. It is a straight-line parser text adventure, no point-and-click safety net, no dialogue wheel, just a prompt and your vocabulary. You type full English sentences, the parser makes sense of them, and the world responds. That feedback loop, humble and text-only as it is, is exactly what JimJams Games set out to rebuild, and the intentionality behind that choice is clear from the first room description. The design is consciously built around a treasure hunt, a structure lifted directly from Crowther and Woods' original Colossal Cave Adventure. There are 20 treasures to locate, and the game layers object manipulation, NPC interaction, and spatial puzzles over the top of that framework. The writing leans comic, with a tone that sits somewhere between gentle British wit and affectionate genre parody. There are nods to the classics scattered through the world, and the developer has said they were meant to land with good humour rather than dusty reverence, which they largely do. Complementary graphics accompany the text in places, offering a visual handhold without undermining the imagination-led design philosophy. The friction is real, though, and you should know that before sitting down. The parser requires patience. Lateral-thinking puzzles can stall progress significantly, and a carry limit on inventory has frustrated at least some players who find weight management in a text adventure more annoying than challenging. A walkthrough community exists on Steam, which tells you something about the puzzle difficulty ceiling. That said, the game ships with a full English-language manual specifically to help new players find their footing, which is a genuinely considerate touch from a small developer who understands the genre's steep entry curve. Who is this for? Anyone who cut their teeth on Infocom, anyone who has a particular fondness for the Zenobi Software catalogue, or anyone curious whether the parser adventure still has something to say in 2025. It is not trying to reinvent the form, and it does not need to. JimJams Games are a retro-specialist studio, and this is their love letter to a mode of play that the industry largely abandoned in the mid-nineties. The commitment is genuine, the world has personality, and the pacing rewards slow, deliberate attention. If you approach it expecting a modern adventure game with some retro dressing, you will bounce off it. If you approach it as the thing it actually is, a compact, funny, properly crafted parser adventure with a clear finish line, it holds up.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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