In the ever-expanding landscape of Souls-like action RPGs, small independent studios continue to take bold swings at a genre dominated by FromSoftware’s legendary catalog. The Relic: First Guardian, developed by the twelve-person team at Korean studio Project Cloud Games, arrived with promising marketing materials touting fresh combat mechanics and a unique spin on Korean folklore. However, despite the admirable ambition of this indie team, the final product delivers an experience that struggles to justify the investment of either time or money from even the most devoted fans of the genre.
The action RPG genre has experienced remarkable growth since the release of Dark Souls in 2011, spawning countless imitators and innovators alike. Games like Lies of P, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice have all attempted to carve their own niches within this demanding category. The Relic: First Guardian attempts to join these ranks by blending parry-focused combat with an open-world structure and narrative elements drawn from Korean mythology, a relatively unexplored territory in Western gaming markets.
A Fragmented World and Confusing Progression
The game transports players to Arsiltus, a medieval realm once protected by a mystical device known as the Great Relic. When this protective artifact shatters, darkness consumes the land, transforming innocent humans into monstrous creatures called Brutals who serve as the game’s boss encounters. Players assume the role of an amnesiac guardian, awakened by a mysterious dark maiden who hints at a shared history and guides the protagonist across the continent in search of the scattered Relic fragments.
One of the most frustrating aspects of The Relic: First Guardian lies in its open-world design philosophy. Unlike more structured Souls-like experiences that guide players through carefully crafted levels, this game throws players into a sprawling landscape with minimal direction. Main story quests and side content are virtually indistinguishable, leaving players uncertain whether defeating a challenging boss will advance the narrative or merely yield a disappointing handful of gold coins. Shimmering fog gates frequently block progression without explaining what criteria must be met to proceed, forcing players to wander aimlessly across repetitive terrain, battling every enemy in hopes of stumbling upon the correct path forward.
Combat Mechanics and Boss Design
The game prominently advertises its roster of nearly eighty boss encounters, which represent both the title’s greatest strength and a source of significant frustration. The combat system draws heavy inspiration from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Lies of P, centering on a parry-based approach with generous timing windows. Standard attacks deal minimal damage, requiring players to fill invisible stagger meters through repeated successful parries before unleashing devastating special attacks mapped to face buttons.
Players can choose from several weapon archetypes including two-handed longswords, sword and shield combinations, and magical battle staves, each featuring unlockable skill trees that can be swapped for minimal cost. The combat itself feels quick and responsive when the game performs properly, and certain boss encounters genuinely impress. Standout fights include a cursed knight reminiscent of Artorias from the original Dark Souls, a thunder-wielding warlock battled amid gravestones, and a series of noble knights and priests encountered in the game’s later sections.
However, the boss quality varies dramatically throughout the experience. Many encounters consist of forgettable human opponents with limited move sets that can be defeated on the first attempt through aggressive parry-spamming. Others employ frustratingly cheap mechanics, including unavoidable one-hit-kill curse attacks and arena hazards that make fair combat nearly impossible. One particularly egregious fight takes place in a field of burning crops, forcing players to manage constant fire damage while parrying, cursed, and unable to heal. Environmental obstacles frequently send the camera spinning wildly, obscuring crucial visual information during intense encounters.
Technical Issues and World Design Problems
Perhaps the most damning criticism of The Relic: First Guardian involves its technical performance and world construction. The open world consists of endlessly repetitive, bloated environments constructed from recycled assets. Players will encounter dozens of identical farm villages and face the same three or four enemy types per zone hundreds of times throughout the roughly twenty-to-thirty-hour campaign. Environmental assets like trees, barrels, and boulders appear randomly scattered with no apparent human oversight, occasionally blocking access to important checkpoints or creating other navigational nightmares.
The reward structure compounds these problems significantly. Every pickup throughout the entire game yields approximately the same meager rewards: thirty to forty gold for small items, six hundred gold for larger chests, and six hundred magical relic points per glowing stone. Weapon upgrades require purchasing materials from town vendors since enemies don’t drop them, creating a tedious grind that feels increasingly pointless as the game progresses. By the final zone, engaging with enemies or upgrading equipment becomes an exercise in futility, as the minimal stat increases make no meaningful difference against the challenges ahead.
Performance issues plague every moment of gameplay, with frame rates regularly dropping to sub-ten frames per second during intense sequences. The final boss encounter proved so buggy that controller inputs failed to register properly until taking damage, and healing items never functioned throughout the entire fight. Voice acting, apparently generated by artificial intelligence, delivers robotic performances that strip any emotional weight from the game’s attempts at storytelling. Quest text and spoken dialogue frequently fail to match, and the English translation reads like pseudo-poetic nonsense that neither entertains nor clearly explains game mechanics.
A Cautionary Tale for Souls-like Enthusiasts
The Relic: First Guardian represents a cautionary tale about ambition exceeding execution in independent game development. While the twelve-person team at Project Cloud Games deserves respect for attempting to tackle such a demanding genre, the final product fails to deliver on virtually every promise made in its marketing materials. The best boss encounters might compare favorably to lesser fights from games like Lies of P or Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, but they cannot approach the quality found throughout FromSoftware’s extensive catalog.
For dedicated fans of Souls-like experiences desperately seeking their next fix, dozens of superior alternatives exist across every gaming platform. The Relic: First Guardian’s combination of repetitive world design, inconsistent boss quality, broken technical performance, and lifeless storytelling creates an experience that rewards neither patience nor skill. Even at a budget price point, players would be better served investing their time and money elsewhere in this increasingly crowded genre.
Editor’s Note: This review is based on an early press copy provided by the publisher. A major patch is scheduled for release prior to the game’s public launch, though it will render existing save files unusable. Given the extensive issues encountered during review and the twenty-to-thirty-hour runtime, a complete replay was not feasible before publication. Readers should be aware that some technical problems discussed here may be addressed in the release version.
Expert Opinion: The Souls-like genre has become increasingly competitive, with players now expecting polished experiences that justify the inherent difficulty these games demand. The Relic: First Guardian’s troubled launch mirrors a concerning trend in indie development where ambitious scope outpaces available resources, resulting in products that damage studio reputations and erode consumer trust. Project Cloud Games would be wise to significantly delay future projects until technical foundations are stable, as the current market offers no forgiveness for unfinished releases regardless of team size.