Today, the public demo for NOMAD: The Legend of Zarqa is live on Steam!
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When we started Ash Games Studio, many of you knew us from Azooma Escape, a lighthearted stealth-comedy about dodging family hospitality. Moving from that into a dark, kinetic action-roguelite was a massive creative leap, but we were driven by a single goal: to bring a severely overlooked, breathtaking mythos from the Arabian Peninsula to life. Stories of heroes, creatures, warnings, legends, and things you probably wouldn't want to encounter after sunset.
We had seen so many games build rich worlds around Greek, Norse, and Egyptian mythology. We kept asking ourselves:
"What would it look like if we looked a little closer to home?"
Forging a Legend: The Story of Zarqa
At the heart of Nomad is Zarqa al-Yamama, one of the most iconic figures of ancient Arabian folklore.
Her legend fascinated us because her greatest gift, her extraordinary, far-reaching sight became her deepest tragedy. She saw catastrophe when no one else could, warned her people of what was coming, and was ignored.
We took that legend and asked ourselves: What happens after the warning is ignored?
That is where our version of Zarqa begins. Armed with her late husband Layth’s Bow, an ancient relic carved from palm wood, her legendary sight transforms into a tool of unyielding retribution across a corrupted wasteland.
8 Playtests, 900+ Players, and the Drawing Board
We realized early on that we couldn't build this game in isolation. Instead of waiting until Nomad was "finished," we started putting early, unpolished builds directly into players' hands.
And then we listened.
Bringing this vision to life was a collective effort, forged directly alongside our community across 7 closed playtests and 1 final public playtest:
The Closed Crucible: Over 220 dedicated community testers broke our early builds, tore apart our mechanics, and pushed us to refine combat fluidity.
The Public Proving Ground: More than 709 players stepped into the dunes during our final public playtest, providing the raw feedback needed to polish every frame of animation and bow feel.
We went back to the drawing board multiple times throughout these eight iterations after every little feedback from the players. It was a crucial exercise in aligning our creative vision with player expectations, ensuring that our passion for the lore never blinded us to game-feel realities. Every arrow trajectory, dash cooldown, and boss phase in this demo exists because of those adjustments.
What Awaits You in the Demo
Kinetic Bow Combat: Wield Layth’s Bow in high-mobility, precision-focused ranged battles.
Wild Build Synergies: Combine mystical upgrades from Badriya with chaotic relics from The Scientist to craft screen-clearing arrow combinations, over 14 different Boons/Upgrades to experiment from!
A Distinct 2.5D World: Explore a tragic realm brought to life through hand-drawn 2D characters and pixel art set inside a dynamic 3D environment.
The Ultimate Test: Face down corrupted desert beasts and test your prowess against an unforgiving world in your path of vengeance.
How You Can Support Us
Pitching an underrepresented mythos to the world as an independent team is in itself quite a challenge. So, If you enjoy your time in the sands, adding NOMAD to your Steam Wishlist is the single most powerful action you can take to help us gain visibility.
To every playtester who broke our builds, every Discord lurker, and every new player downloading the demo today: thank you for helping us bring this legend to life.
Notch your arrow, step into the sands, and share your wildest experiences with us in the Steam Community Hub or on our Discord server.
See you at the oasis,
— Ash Games Studio