When a code for The Relic: First Guardian came across my desk, I was eager to snatch it up. Generic title aside, the game promised “fresh takes on [action RPG] combat” and a gritty spin on Korean folklore wrapped in a somewhat Souls-like bundle. I had hope in Korean devs Project Cloud Games and their ambition and wanted to support their small team of twelve. Yet, for all my respect for the indie hustle, I absolutely hated the many hours I put into The Relic: First Guardian and feel compelled to warn readers that the game is worth neither your time nor your money.
The story in The Relic: First Guardian is set in the medieval world of Arsiltus, protected from ravenous monsters by a device called the Great Relic. When the Great Relic is destroyed, the world is swallowed by a shadowy Void that turns even well-meaning humans into monstrous “Brutals,” who serve as the game’s bosses. Players reawaken as an amnesiac guardian at the hands of a dark maiden who hints at a past relationship. This woman guides players throughout the continent on a vague journey to collect fragments of the Great Relic.
One issue I had with The Relic: First Guardian was the open-world structure. There’s generally no clear marking of which quests are of the main story and which are side stories. You never know if the boss you’ve been throwing yourself at will progress things or simply net you a measly handful of gold and a dead-end. Meanwhile, shimmering fog gates will frequently block progression until you meet some unsaid criteria, meaning the game forces you to wade through every thicket and over every hill, slaying each boss you find while keeping you ignorant of whether it’s worth the effort.
The Relic: First Guardian heavily advertises its near-80 bosses, and for the most part, these are the biggest strength of the game. A fair chunk of these bosses are forgettable bandits and other man-on-man duels, and all but a few bosses feature single phases with only a handful of moves to learn to counter. Like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Lies of P, The Relic: First Guardian is designed around parrying, here with a generous window for timing. Your attacks do little damage, so bosses and field enemies alike need to have unseen stagger bars filled with sometimes dozens of parries to knock ‘em out and deal real damage with special attacks mapped to face buttons.
The combat is quick and punchy across the several styles of expected weapons: two-handed longsword, sword and shield, magic battle staff, and so on, each with unlockable skill trees that you can swap at the aforementioned maiden for a cheap item. With most bosses, I got by parrying with the sword and shield, though a couple more monstrous Brutals required me to swap for a more dodge-friendly build. Off the top of my head, the standout fights were a cursed knight that evoked Artorias of the Abyss from the first Dark Souls, a thunder-wielding warlock in a graveyard, and a string of rather noble knights and priests towards the end.
I’m something of a Souls-like fiend yet by no means high-skilled, but even I could topple most of The Relic: First Guardian‘s bosses on my first try by mostly mashing the parry button and wailing back with special attack skills. Still, certain bosses were very cheaply designed around one-hit-kill moves that gave the game artificial difficulty spikes. An unavoidable crow-controlling witch could curse me in a single hit from a flurry of attacks. Once cursed, a snap from her fingers would end me regardless of my health.
Another curse-wielding Brutal’s fight took place in a field of burning crops, meaning I had to contend with constant parrying, while on fire, while cursed and unable to heal. Still other boss arenas were full of felled trees and other debris that sent my camera wild. Lastly, the final boss was so bugged out for me that half the buttons on my controller did not work from entering the boss arena until I got hit, and even then my healing items never worked. I ended up dying about a hundred and fifty times, but much of it was to a small handful of gimmicks or glitches.
I’ve said about all the nice things I have to say about The Relic: First Guardian. The best bosses here might stand alongside the lesser run-of-the-mill bosses from, say, Lies of P’s base game or Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, but they don’t even scratch FromSoftware’s catalogue.
But players beware: it’s the huge, repetitive, soulless world between these decent bosses that made me truly hate my time playing The Relic: First Guardian, and which inspires me to warn away even the most hopeless of Souls-like addicts like myself.
Firstly, the open world is an endlessly tedious, bloated pile of reused assets. You’ll think you’ve gone insane when you see the fiftieth identical farm village, or when you’ve struck down the same three enemy types per zone for the thousandth time. Thank goodness enemies don’t respawn. Then there’s the way assets like trees and barrels are plunked haphazardly around with what seemed to be no human oversight or quality check. I was unable to access one checkpoint after a major boss battle because it was half-blocked by a boulder in the environment… and nobody thought to check that? It reeks of, dare I say, non-human random placement of assets.
Everything is foggy, flat, and full of samey foliage, and populated by “rewards” that feel about as rewarding as a spit in the eye. There’s no scale in the rewards, meaning every drop throughout the game will grant 30 to 40 gold for small pickups, 600 gold for larger chests, and 600 magical relic points per found glowing rock.
To level up your weapons by a few measly damage points, you need to spend this gold on stones and gems in town—enemies don’t drop them, and they usually can’t be found in the wild. By the third and final zone, I didn’t even bother with enemy encounters or upgrading my weapons, as everything I’d repeated endlessly for the previous twenty hours had made not a speck of difference.
Besides the 80 bosses, the other crux of The Relic: First Guardian is the writing, said to imbue backstory and pathos in each enemy. Har har. I can’t read the original Korean, so I’ll blame the awful English translation. Weapons, skills, and items are tagged with long, meandering descriptions that read like pseudo-poetic drivel that neither entertain nor inform you what they actually do.
Centering text,
Does not automatically make something
Sound profound.
Hey… maybe it does!
Most quests hinge on finding ghostly mirages that open text boxes, awkwardly read to you by AI voiceovers, same as all the villagers and seemingly most of the NPCs. Truly, no voice at all would’ve been better than the robotic garbage I experienced. Such quests usually begin with NPCs or texts mentioning someone by name, like a “Taylor” or a “Gus” (you know, those characters from rich Korean folklore). You follow the string of texts for a few turns, chop down some zombie soldiers or looters, and then you find *gasp* that Taylor or Gus has transformed into a man-eating Brutal. No joke, the biggest smile this game gave me was the boss healthbar that read “Gus the Accursed.”
Of the many quests and events I did follow through to the end, all reward you with depressingly bleak conclusions that, when combined with the inhuman AI voices, make The Relic: First Guardian’s biggest purported strength—its humanity—decidedly lifeless. Somebody on the dev team saw the understated environmental storytelling beloved in FromSoftware’s games and thought, “This needs more telling and less showing!”
I have not even mentioned the terrible performance and glitches, too numerous to mention. The Relic: First Guardian regularly ran at sub-10 frames per second, about as smooth and fast as a snail in ill-fitting cleats. I often had to quit to the menu and reload, which would cost me a random chunk of time and progress. I soon got used to guessing my parry timing when the game decided to switch over to Microsoft PowerPoint mode.
Then, the buttons and inputs often just decided not to work. Post-boss fight fog walls refused to lower, trapping me and forcing me to fight the boss again. One time a boss’s leap got him stuck outside his own arena, and we just stared at each other like, “Sup?” until I was forced to reload. Voice and text or subtitles didn’t match (at all) around half the time. It’s just an unfinished mess, masquerading in trailers as something players think reminds them of Elden Ring.
I think I could write about 4000 more words of complaining about The Relic: First Guardian, but I’m eager to simply wash my hands clean of this game and forget it ever existed. If you love Souls-likes or action RPGs, there are dozens of other experiences you’re better off playing. This one’s not even worth your curiosity.
Note from the Editor: Please note that this review is based on an early copy supplied to us by the publisher. Hours before publication of this review, we learned a major patch will be released for The Relic: First Guardian prior to its public release on Friday, but after our publication time. While it’s possible it may fix some of the issues discussed in this review, this patch will render existing save files unusable, so the only way to accurately review this updated version in full would be to fully restart and replay the entire game.
Given the poor experience Matt had with this game, we were not going to force him to play it all over again “just in case.” Regardless, doing so would be impossible before our publication time, let alone the game’s release on Friday, with its 20–30-hour runtime. So please keep this in mind, and know this review is an accurate representation of the game supplied to us for review purposes. Hopefully, the release version of the game indeed solves some of the issues discussed here.
