Sarab: Duji Tower

I have a soft spot for games that exist almost entirely outside the coverage ecosystem - no press kit, no review embargo, no YouTube walkthrough army. Sarab: Duji Tower is exactly that kind of game: a solo-developed RPG Maker title released in late 2016 by a single developer, Abdulla Hassan Al-Farsi, that quietly sits on Steam without a Metacritic page to its name and a community forum that amounts to fewer than ten threads. That obscurity is both its charm and its honest warning label. The bones are classically JRPG: overhead exploration across environments, turn-based combat structured around a party, elemental crystals woven into the lore, and a villain with a suitably ominous title (Goblet of Death is the kind of name a teenager might invent, and I mean that with genuine affection). The story sets up a world where a past hero defeated this creature using a legendary sword and five nature-element crystals, only for a new threat to emerge from a mysterious box. Each main character carries their own narrative thread, which at this scope means the writing does the heavy lifting where production values cannot. Whether those threads pay off depends entirely on your patience with RPG Maker's structural limitations - encounters can feel repetitive, and the game offers no built-in guide for the moments where puzzle logic turns opaque. Community posts note that players do get stuck, and there is no official walkthrough to rescue them. What makes this worth a conversation at all is its atmosphere. There is something genuinely unusual about a JRPG built from a non-Western cultural perspective, even if that influence operates subtly at the level of aesthetic choices and tonal mood rather than explicit folklore. The game does not feel like a Final Fantasy clone trying to ape Nintendo nostalgia. It feels like someone working alone, building the game they wanted to play, and that handcraft sincerity comes through in small ways - a particular visual choice in an environment, a moment in the story that lingers a beat longer than expected. Full controller support is included, which is a small but telling signal of care for how the player will actually sit with the experience. The honest caveats: this is an RPG Maker game at a micro price point, and it carries all the genre baggage that implies. Combat depth is limited. Visual polish is constrained by the engine. The open ending frustrated at least one community member enough to post publicly about it years later, which tells you the story lands emotionally even if it does not close cleanly. Achievements were requested in the forum and apparently never added. If you are coming in expecting production values comparable to anything on the front page of Steam, recalibrate entirely. For the right player - someone who likes digging into the quiet corners, who finds the RPG Maker aesthetic cozy rather than cheap, who is curious what a JRPG looks like filtered through a solo developer's singular vision - Sarab: Duji Tower offers something genuinely hard to find: a small game that does not pretend to be anything other than what it is.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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