The Relic: First Guardian Reviews
The true dark fantasy of The Relic: First Guardian is all of the potential it squanders; an energetic action game marred by its own shambolic state and broken in too many inexcusable ways.
The Relic: First Guardian is a game with good ideas, but it ultimately fails to execute them. Performance issues, recurring bugs, and the lack of essential navigation features make the experience feel unfinished, leaving the impression that it needed more time in development.
The Korean studio doesn't quite hit its stride. Despite this, and provided the technical aspects are quickly fixed, The Relic: First Guardian is a dark ARPG that rewards initiative without ever becoming too frustrating or punishing; it's not a mere imitation of FromSoftware's work.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Relic: The First Guardian is not so messy as to be unplayable. In fact, the game’s combat can be excellent at times, and the use of Korean folklore twisted into a dark narrative is an interesting idea.
There are things about The Relic: First Guardian that I absolutely loved. The game's exploration also leaves something for you to find, and the game's combat is satisfying and rewarding. It's just a shame I had to suffer through major bugs that kept me from progressing or finishing quests.
The Relic: First Guardian is a purgatory of tedium and glitches dressed up to look like a heavy-hitter action RPG.
The Relic: First Guardian's unpolished edges almost undermine the experience, but atmospheric exploration through a haunting world will pull you through.
Between rough gameplay feel and mechanics, The Relic: First Guardian doesn't present itself with a bang, but with a wimper.
Relic: The First Guardian has the foundations of a solid action RPG, with an impressive roster of over 70 unique bosses and a respectable variety of Relic-based abilities that keep major encounters engaging. Unfortunately, those strengths are constantly undermined by shallow combat mechanics, clunky animations, inconsistent voice acting, poor audio design, technical issues, and surprisingly amateur translation errors. Rather than a true Soulslike, this is a straightforward action game weighed down by an overwhelming number of avoidable flaws. With more polish, it could have been a pleasant surprise. Instead, it ends up as a frustrating experience that rarely allows its best ideas to shine.
Review in Persian | Read full review
The Relic: First Guardian is ultimately a game full of promising ideas that rarely reaches its potential. Its departures from the traditional Souls-like formula initially make it stand out, even if its relentlessly bleak atmosphere won't appeal to everyone. Unfortunately, those innovations are undermined by frustrating boss encounters that highlight weaknesses in the core combat. Throw in inconsistent presentation, sparse PC options, and missing quality-of-life features like key rebinding, and the result is a game that's difficult to recommend in its current state. With enough patches and thoughtful refinements, it could eventually carve out its own place alongside the genre's best, but for now, it remains an ambitious experiment that falls short of its goals.
The Relic: First Guardian is a work of violent contrasts, a crossroads where an almost moving authorial passion collides head-on with undeniable production and technical limitations.
Review in Italian | Read full review
After trying to give The Relic a fair shot I just could not continue. The bosses are unbalanced, and combat is just too janky to really enjoy it. Statues effect are very punishing with some of the first few bosses you will encounter. I’m not sure why the game decided to riddle the world with notes, and make them right next to each other at that. With me even counting 11 notes exactly one after another, that just led to a boss fight. An empty, lifeless world with side-quest that end up feeling like just filler. But honestly from the 8 hours I spent with The Relic, the whole time has felt like useless padding. A very large amount of my frustration comes from just how bad the hit boxes are. Tie that with the severe dropping in frame rate over nothing going on in the world. And even worse when you actually fight one enemy let alone a group or boss. Everything is just a chore, and I just couldn’t push through. I really don’t have any praise for The Relic: First Guardian. It’s definitely the Thumb Culture Bronze Award.
Unfortunately, The Relic: First Guardian disappointed us. It has plenty of ideas, quests, and bosses, but everything feels a bit slapdash and poorly polished. You can sense the passion and dedication, but productions of this scale require more structured teams and a significantly larger budget. It would have been better to lower the bar a bit, reducing the quantity of content in favor of higher quality—both in terms of the combat system (the game’s core) and the technical aspects. We hope this first project will serve as a learning experience for the developer to understand where they went wrong, because there’s no shortage of ideas, passion, and love for the genre.
Review in Italian | Read full review
The Relic: First Guardian is certainly an ambitious debut project from the studio Project Cloud Games, promising a vast open world, eighty unique elite enemies, and a simple yet conceptually strong story. However, that ambition ultimately hindered development, resulting in a product that fails to deliver on any of its initial promises in a polished state. This forces those who have already purchased the game to wait for numerous fixes before it reaches the level of quality promised by the trailers and promotional material.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
either a soulslike nor an action RPG, The Relic: First Guardian is a huge wasted potential due to its lack of technical polish and severe stability issues.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
The Relic: First Guardian is a game that dared to be different and suffered for it. In the pursuit of challenging what has been tried and tested, it put forth a plethora of great ideas: equipment-based tactical combat, non-respawning enemies as progression, and genuinely great boss battles. Unfortunately, it also revealed why those ideas weren’t the norm. Poor animation implementation, questionable camerawork, and forgettable narratives all end up making this a much lesser product than the sum of its parts. In fixing what wasn’t broken, it only revealed the cracks within itself.
The Relic: First Guardian is a solid addition for Soulslike fans, offering fast combat, engaging lore, deep weapon skill trees, and great boss design. However, weak visuals, unstable PS5 performance, and a generic art style drag the experience down significantly, preventing it from reaching greater heights.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
The Relic: First Guardian is best described as an action RPG that blossoms despite its clear limitations. It is far from a perfectly well-rounded game, with awkward animations, imprecise controls, and underwhelming character models standing out as obvious flaws. Even so, its stylish combat, built around carefully timed attacks and defenses, delivers a thrilling sense of catharsis that keeps you coming back.
Review in Korean | Read full review
The Relic: First Guardian is not only one of the worst Soulslikes I have ever played, but a prime candidate for the worst game of 2026. It's a game that crumbles under the weight of its own ambition, aiming to be the next Elden Ring and missing the target wildly. Not one aspect of this game warrants praise, and in its current state, it is an affront to the Souls genre as a whole. It's time I will never get back, but hopefully through my suffering, you won't suffer the same fate.
The Relic: First Guardian is Project Cloud Games debut title. It has some issues, like performance issues and a lack of some basic mechanics like jumping, but the world-building, the skill tree, the combat, the bosses and the feeling of wonder we all need and love from Soulslike is present. It has jank sure, but it has heart, and it’s one of my favourite experiences of the year, and something that I will continually be heading back to for the next few months.