Rare Castle on becoming a PlayStation Partner, funding Project Escher and building “Healing Games”

Becoming an Official PlayStation Partner is a major milestone for any independent developer. For Rare Castle founder Mohamed Fawzy, it was the result of years spent turning an idea that began in his head into a documented studio, business model and game.

Rare Castle started as a solo project in 2018 while Fawzy was working a full-time job. Today, he is developing Project Escher, a PC and PlayStation psychological mystery that is being built around his “Healing Games” philosophy.

We spoke to Fawzy about what it took to become a PlayStation Partner, how he is funding Project Escher, and why he wants to create a psychological mystery that does not rely on fear.

IsaKaba: You started Rare Castle as a solo project in 2018. How did the studio come about, and how big is the team currently?

Mohammed Fawzy: Rare Castle began in 2018 as a wild idea that lived in my head while I was working a full-time job. Between 2018 and 2023, I spent every hour outside that job turning something non-physical into something real.

The first step was digital. I built the Rare Castle website and used it to define what the studio actually was: its long-term vision, its game design philosophy, and eventually its business model. The plan was always the same progression, from my head, to the web, to the ground. From 2023 onward it started becoming tangible.

In early 2023, I began documenting Rare Castle's business model and its internal organization and team systems. That was also when Rare Castle got its first real public attention in Egypt. Doa Salah of Arcadedou invited me onto her podcast, and it became the first substantial public conversation about what I was building.

In mid-2023, I developed the first version of the Souls and Mechanical Vessels system. In late 2023 I gathered years of scattered notes about the story, lore, characters, places and concepts, and documented them properly, because the story had finally evolved enough to hold together.

In late 2024 I started writing the core Game Design Document, which reached roughly 35 pages alongside a separate story and lore document. In early 2025, with the design and story documented, I wrote the game pitch. And in the first quarter of 2025, Rare Castle became an official PlayStation Partner.

You’ve taken Rare Castle from a solo project to a six-person volunteer team and back to solo development. What has that taught you about when to grow a team?

The business side developed in parallel, because in this market the business question isn't separate from the creative one. The indie market is brutal, and a lot of brilliant games die for one reason: their creators can't survive financially long enough to finish them. So I designed Rare Castle around a combined model of crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and funding from angels, VCs and publishers, built to survive first and grow second.

We've put the crowdsourcing part of that model into practice. In mid-2025 the volunteer team peaked at six people. Building a program where developers with limited or beginner experience could contribute real work to a real project was one of the hardest things I've done, and it taught me the most.

A bigger team does not automatically mean faster development. It's a double-edged sword, more capacity on one side and more coordination on the other, and you're holding it while acting as project manager, game director and senior developer at the same time. Lose your balance and it cuts you. The lesson I took from that is now a rule I work by: team size has to match what the project actually needs and what one person can genuinely direct at that stage.

I also want to be clear about the people themselves. They were brilliant, promising human beings and I'm honored to have worked with them. They built early versions of systems I later developed much further, and I have no doubt they're going to good places.

We designed the program around flexibility on purpose. Volunteers can come and go and contribute when and where they want, and permanent commitment was never the price of participation. We assumed from the start that sustained unpaid work has natural limits, and we planned for that rather than being surprised by it. I've documented that whole chapter in my dev log diary series.

As for today, the team is one, and that one is me. In late 2025, I completed a three-month development sprint that produced the adventure half of the prototype and submitted it to the PlayStation MENA Hero Project. By mid-2026, we'd implemented controller and gamepad support, made a lot of gameplay improvements and fixed a lot of bugs.

I'm now working solo through the second development sprint, which is deep systems work, and that's the right structure for this stage. The crowdsourcing system is proven and it stays available. I'll bring volunteers back when the production need justifies it, and not before.

You recently met Sujith Sukumaran who leads the PlayStation MENA Hero Project. How did that meeting come about and what did you discuss?

On September 1st 2026, at the Cairo Marriott Hotel, I met Sujith Sukumaran, Senior Program Manager for PlayStation Business Development and Strategic Initiatives across India and MENA at Sony Interactive Entertainment, who manages the Hero Project in both regions.

SIE requested the meeting. It was a dedicated one-to-one session between SIE and Rare Castle, connected to our Hero Project submission, and I showed him Project Escher. We spent the meeting on Off the Grid: Bad Dream and on Rare Castle itself, and the conversation widened from there into game development generally, our shared history as players, and the state of the independent scene across the region.

Two things stayed with me afterwards. The first was practical. I came away with a clearer picture of how this industry works commercially, from someone who has spent a career inside it, and that is not a perspective you can read your way into.

The second is harder to quantify. I have loved PlayStation since I was a child, and meeting Sony Interactive Entertainment as an organisation of people rather than as a logo on the console I grew up with gave a different shape to the ambition I've been describing throughout this interview.

I ended the meeting by telling him what I hoped the next one would look like: the same conversation, with a fully playable vertical slice of Project Escher on the table between us.

What does the process of being an Official PlayStation Partner actually look like from the inside? What are some of the requirements you had to meet?

Years ago, the idea that I would be developing a title for PlayStation was a distant, imaginary dream. It didn't survive because it was realistic. It survived because I kept it burning, through a long-term commitment to a vision and to this project, on a road that only belief and persistence get you down.

Then one day the dream stopped being a dream. Rare Castle became a PlayStation Partner. Honestly, what the process asked of me was less about paperwork than about arriving with something real. By the time I applied, Rare Castle existed as a defined studio with a documented vision, a documented business model, a documented game and a pitch.

The formal requirements and the process itself are published openly on PlayStation's partner site, so I won't recite them here. The part that mattered on the inside was the years of work that made me eligible to walk through that door at all.

I also want to be precise about what this status is and isn't. Being a PlayStation Partner means Rare Castle can legitimately start building toward the kind of console studio I imagined years ago. It does not make us a first-party PlayStation studio. That's the next dream, a studio working on a serious first-party PlayStation title, and I intend to reach it. But I'm naming it as an ambition, not as a fact.

Tell us about Project Escher. Where did the idea come from? And what stage of development is the game in right now?

It started with a simple idea and a few characters, and it never stopped growing.

A note on names, because they can get confusing. Off the Grid: Bad Dream is the game. Project Escher is its development codename, and Off the Grid is the wider universe, the connected stories, worlds, places and characters that extend beyond this first title.

I've always been pulled toward inventing stories, characters and worlds. Since 2018 I've written down every idea that arrived unannounced, at completely unexpected times, and the story evolved in those notes for years. I did later spend time with MBTI psychology and found it a useful lens on my own creative habits, but the story came first, long before that.

Some of it comes from personal experience. Some of it is completely imaginary. And some of it comes from directors whose work shaped me: David Cage, Sam Lake, Hideo Kojima and Brian Mitsoda. The codename comes from Maurits Cornelis Escher, his impossible geometry, his non-Euclidean spaces, his staircases that shouldn't exist. When I try to imagine what something outside space and time would look like, Escher's paintings are the closest visual language I have.

The game engages with big, bold questions about consciousness, reality and existence: Idealism, Physicalism, Dualism, the radical propositions Donald Hoffman has made about consciousness, and work by physicists like Nima Arkani-Hamed on structures that may lie beyond space-time. I want to be very clear that the game isn't claiming to answer any of this, and neither am I. These are open questions, and I use them the way a novelist uses them, as material for mystery.

The way I hold the two together is this. Science is a tool in humanity's endless journey to discover how the universe works and what its laws are. Philosophy is the compass that helps us ask the right questions in the first place. Both are ways of approaching something larger than us, and neither of them exhausts it.

As for stage, we're in prototype. The first sprint produced the adventure half. The second sprint, which I'm in now, covers the action, shooting and crystal-healing half. Completing both gives us the full prototype and vertical slice.

We noticed the game is already available to wishlist on the PlayStation Store, that's a big milestone. How is development currently being funded and is there a separate milestone you're chasing?

It's a huge milestone. So far Project Escher has been entirely bootstrapped and self-funded. That was deliberate. I wanted to reach the point where I could show what this game is rather than describe it.

We're now raising for the next stage. We're actively pitching publishers and investors, with a major focus on the PlayStation MENA Hero Project and its funding and incubation track. Crowdfunding is part of the model too, but it's a tool with a right moment, and we'll use it when the project has earned that moment.

The near-term milestone is concrete. Finish the second development sprint, the action, shooting and crystal-healing half, then complete the full prototype and vertical slice for the PlayStation MENA Hero Project.

The capital isn't the goal. The goal is to take something already proven with my own resources and build it into the complete experience I know it can become.

The Inner Monologue mechanic during confrontation is intriguing. How does it work, and what does it add to the player's experience?

If you've played Control, you'll remember the moments where the game lets you hear what's going on inside Jesse Faden's head. Those glimpses arrive when the director chooses to give them to you. I wanted to hand more of that control to the player.

Our Inner Monologue system lets you reach into the protagonist's head across different moments and encounters through the story, rather than waiting for the story to open the door for you. The reason is emotional rather than informational. Confrontation is the moment a character is least able to hide, and being inside someone's thoughts right then changes your relationship with them.

You stop watching a protagonist and start carrying one. That's the effect I'm after: less distance between the player and the character, and a mystery you're inside of rather than one you're observing.

On your website, we noticed you've coined the term "Healing Games." What does that mean, and why do you think the industry needs this genre?

Healing Games is the creative philosophy behind Rare Castle. The short version: games that heal the soul. I'm a huge fan of Silent Hill and Alan Wake. I love the mystery, the psychological tension, the atmosphere. What I wanted to try was taking those same ingredients and aiming them somewhere else emotionally.

Instead of fear and anxiety as the destination, we aim for calm, hope, love, faith, knowledge and curiosity. And it isn't only about removing negative emotions. The more interesting design problem is transformation: whether a game can take the fear and dread a player walks in carrying and turn it into something else by the end.

As for why the industry needs it, games have real emotional power. They frighten us, thrill us, make us laugh, make us think, and stay with us for years after we finish them. I think that power is mostly aimed in one direction, and I don't believe fear and anxiety are neutral things to spend a hundred hours inside.

My conviction is that the same craft can be deliberately aimed at calm, reflection, hope and growth instead, and that there's an audience who would welcome it.

I want to be careful here. Healing Games is an artistic and design philosophy, not a medical claim. I'm not saying Project Escher is a treatment. I'm saying that entertainment doesn't have to be the only thing a game leaves behind, and I want to find out how far that idea can go.

How we actually execute it is a much longer conversation. It runs through the GDD, through the world design, and through nearly every system in the game.

What do you think makes the game stand out, and what part of the experience do you most want players to enjoy?

Project Escher is a psychological mystery that doesn't run on fear.

That's the difference, and I'd put it in three words: Mystery Without Fear. Everything people love about the genre: the curiosity, the uncertainty, the pull of not knowing, without fear being the price of admission or the emotional destination. Healing Games isn't a layer painted on top of that. It's the thing that decides how the world, the story and the systems get built.

What I want the player to feel is transformation rather than dread. I want the experience to carry them somewhere over its length, not just tighten a knot in their chest for twenty hours. If there's one element I hope people remember, it's the crystal. It's the heart of how you act on this world, power and transformation in a single object, and it's used for healing, for combat and for interacting with the environment.

In a genre where the iconic object is usually a weapon or a flashlight, ours is something that can mend. Around it sits the world. Souls and Mechanical Vessels is the foundation of how this universe works. And the spaces themselves don't always behave. Non-Euclidean geometry and optical-illusion-inspired environments mean the environment can be part of the mystery rather than just the container for it.

Underneath all of it is one idea: the mystery has to lead somewhere emotionally meaningful. What you choose to heal rather than destroy. What you understand by the end that you didn't understand at the start. That's the part I most want players to enjoy. I want them to finish and feel that they didn't just complete a story. They lived one.

What do you see as the opportunities and challenges of building a game studio from Egypt?

Egypt is fertile ground for business and startups, and game development is no exception. There's a large young population, a growing technology sector and a lot of creative talent.

The challenge isn't really specific to Egypt. Building a game that competes internationally is hard from anywhere. It takes time, focus and capital wherever you do it.

Project Escher is currently planned for PC and PlayStation. Do you have any plans to bring the game to other platforms like mobile or Switch?

Project Escher is built as a PC and console experience, in its design, its story and its visual ambition. That's a deliberate scope decision, not a dismissal of other platforms. I don't want to dilute a project this size by chasing every platform before the core experience is what it needs to be. Focus is one of the few real advantages an independent studio has.

Once Project Escher is established on PC and console, I'm open to expanding wherever it makes creative and business sense. And the vision was never a single game. The Off the Grid universe has already grown vast in my notes and documentation, a set of connected stories, worlds, places and characters.

Structurally, it's closer to the way Control and Alan Wake sit inside one shared universe than to a standalone title that might get a sequel later. That's what makes the platform question interesting rather than limiting.

Some of those experiences may eventually be designed from the ground up for platforms with different hardware, built for them rather than compromised down to them. That's a far better answer than weakening this one. For now, the priority is simple: build the best PC and console version of Project Escher we can.

Off The Grid: Bad Dream (Project Escher) is available to Wishlist on the PlayStation Store.

Additional editing by Isa Muhammad