Here’s the problem with trying to fix a genre that already works: you’d better be sure the thing was actually broken. The Relic: First Guardian is an action RPG from Project Cloud Games that sets itself up as an “unapologetic challenge” to how Soulslikes normally do business. It throws out the stat sheets and the mountain of loot, hands you equipment-based combat instead, and lets enemies stay dead once you’ve killed them. On paper, that sounds kind of brilliant. In practice, you spend most of your time fighting the controls, the camera, and the frame rate.
I wanted this one to be good. You can tell a real team built it, with actual passion behind the idea. But cool ideas only matter if the game around them holds up, and this one doesn’t — which is exactly why it lands at 64/100.
What’s the Story About?
The setting is Arsilthus, a fantasy land pushed to the edge of destruction. You’re its hero, and your job is to put the place back together: track down the shards of a shattered artifact and take down the Brutals guarding them, one big monster at a time. That’s the pitch, and honestly it’s enough to get you walking.
Where it wobbles is the telling. Every game in this genre opens with a lore dump — the world’s in danger, only you can save it, here are the big bads — and First Guardian checks all those boxes without ever turning them into a story you care about. It reads less like an intro with craft and more like someone dumping their notes on your lap. Without spoiling anything, the opening makes it sound like somebody shattered the big magic ring all over again and you’re here to sweep up the mess.
The mission-based NPC storylines aren’t anything special either. Forget complex character arcs or clever writing. You’re mostly here to bonk monsters into dust, and the game is completely fine with that.
How It Actually Plays
The bones are familiar. This is a third-person action RPG set across a semi-open world with branching paths and wide-open spaces, and you kick off with the exact first steps you’d expect after the intro cutscene. It even looks the part: massive horizon scale, fantasy-medieval vibes, cinematic presentation. Set aside the obvious art direction differences and the average player could easily be convinced this was a Soulsborne game. That first impression is strong, and the game earns it — then it disappears like an illusory wall about five minutes in.
Feature-wise, you’re looking at artifact-based progression, fast-paced third-person combat, semi-open world exploration, branching skill trees for each main weapon, and a quest-based narrative. Those are the ingredients. The cooking is where it gets shaky.
The Loop Is Different, Not Necessarily Better
Your routine is simple. You go somewhere, talk to NPCs, smash enemies, reach the area’s final boss, die a bunch, hopefully score some new gear, and then do it all over again. One key difference: there’s no leveling currency, and enemies don’t respawn. Clear an area and you’re done with it. No reason to ever go back — just keep moving forward.
Unique? For sure. Fun? That’s where we hit the first example of the game being different just for the sake of it. You never have to grind through punishing waves of roaming enemies again, but every area also becomes strictly one-and-done. No secrets to circle back for, no replayability. Nail it once or get lucky, and that zone is permanently in the rearview mirror.
Soulslikes and action RPGs are supposed to be grindy. That’s the whole point. You throw yourself against an immovable wall of stats over and over until you break through, because that’s where most of the satisfaction lives. The enemies here aren’t any easier, but since nothing respawns, every outing gets progressively easier until it’s basically a stroll to the boss arena. None of that is satisfying. I’m almost surprised bosses heal fully between attempts — I half-expected them to carry damage over, just to keep the subversion going.
The Combat Almost Works
Real quick: this game’s combat is clunky, and I don’t mean the progression or the skill trees. We’ll get there. I mean the actual controls.
Attacks cost no stamina at all — only defense does. So you can swing as much as you want, as long as you’re fine eating a few hits. Pair that with a cooldown-based skill system, a refillable consumable setup, multiple passive relic skills, and environmental attacks, and it honestly plays more like For Honor’s duels than any Soulslike. Instead of one guy doing the turbo macarena until the boss keels over, fights become methodical, visceral, and very, very cinematic.
That could have been a brilliant subversion of the stat-heavy approach most action RPGs rely on. Stats still matter — that’s why upgrades exist — but tactics and knowing your tools inside and out decide who comes out on top.
Then you actually try to do it.
Almost every attack has an agonizingly long recovery that doesn’t have the i-frames (invincibility frames) to make up for it, and there’s no way to cancel animations and save yourself. Parrying becomes a joke, because the animation does a terrible job showing when the parry window actually is. And since this isn’t a stat-based game, nothing tells you which attacks have hyper-armor. So you mistime your parry, get stun-locked before you can follow up, and die.
Is this just a git-gud situation? Am I just bad? Maybe. It’s hard to tell how you’re supposed to improve when the animations are this janky and there’s no direct way to boost your stats — and that’s exactly the problem. There’s a wide variety of weapons, even if the devs stuck to standard archetypal categories instead of a ton of totally unique ones. But if the core combat is already this rough, it doesn’t matter what you’re holding. Everything feels clunky from the get-go.
The Bosses Are Good. The Camera Isn’t.
There are nearly a hundred bosses in this game, and the variety of combat situations they throw at you is just as broad. On paper, that deserves nothing but praise.
The opener is the classic “huge guy in a tiny room” fight that a lot of action RPGs open with, complete with unblockable attacks and a fire-soaked arena. It should have been a fun encounter. Instead, the whole thing takes place in a burning chapel the size of a Minecraft villager’s house, and the camera goes haywire the moment he gets close because there’s no room. Another boss hits you with rapid attacks and zero tells — brutal when your parry window lasts an attosecond — but the arena offers tons of indirect ways to hurt him: explosive barrels, ranged spells, you name it. Fun, right? Nope. The camera turns into a blender the second you’re cornered.
How is a player supposed to enjoy the payoff of good play and smart strategy if half your tools don’t work? Mastering parry timings through the awful animations is one thing. Fighting your own camera just for the right to see what’s happening is another.
Oh, and some bosses straight up don’t show up. I appreciate the free win, I guess, but I’m not here for handouts. I’m here to test my patience against something that fights back. Walk into what is obviously a boss arena and find only a regular enemy waiting, and you might get mad enough to take the missing boss’s spot yourself. This happened super early in my first run, in an abandoned village crawling with bandits. I grabbed the story item, which was cool, but missed out on the satisfaction of actually earning it.
It’ll Make Your PS5 Sweat
Like I said, this game looks great. Beefy particle effects on every attack, textures sharp enough to impress. All of that works against itself in certain areas, because somehow — against all odds — even the PlayStation 5 gets brought to its knees just trying to run it.
A burning village obviously has a ton of particles going at once, and every swing I add pushes the console harder. Toss in some enemies, physics from all the breakable objects, and that amber firelit haze, and you’ve got the world’s most chaotic slideshow. If this were a mid-tier PC I’d get it, but we’re talking about a PS5 here. The forested areas aren’t much better, with leaves swaying in the wind and fires sparking at any moment, so you’re basically stuck experiencing the game several frames behind where you should be.
Progression, and Getting Around
Okay, so the combat’s rough, the camera fights you, and the engine shudders with every swing. Does it get better once you push further in? Supposedly.
Progression is unusual: instead of traditional stats, you collect specialized pieces of weapons and armor — of which there are relatively few — and build around those.
That creates a loop that’s brutally hard at the back end and progressively easier at the front: tough, then easy, then easier, then brutally hard all over again. It’s all skill checks, which kinda kills the fantasy of being the hero you want to be. Even worse, the micro-progression of upgrading equipment isn’t explained clearly at all. You’ve got gold and relic power as currencies, plus skill trees to unlock for each weapon, and none of those let you upgrade your gear. The item you actually need isn’t easy to find unless you go spelunking through guides.
You die a lot, and enemies don’t respawn, so the walkback’s easy — combat-wise. Convenience-wise, not so much. This isn’t a true open world like Elden Ring, with vast stretches of land and branching paths splitting off everywhere. The map isn’t huge, but it’s big enough to get annoying when you’re trekking across the whole thing just to die again in some far-off dungeon. No Torrent or any vehicle to speed things up, and no real verticality either, so it’s all just big and wide for no good reason. Fast travel? Don’t even think about it. It’s technically possible, but you’ll be lucky to find more than a handful of points scattered across the map, so you’ll end up taking the long way regardless.
What Clicks and What Doesn’t
This game is a mess, but not because the devs didn’t try to make something unique. It’s an ambitious project with real passion and thought behind it — it just ended up way less than the sum of its parts. Everything good about The Relic: First Guardian gets undermined by a fundamental flaw in execution. The gorgeous visuals strain anything but the most powerful hardware, the world’s scale makes it feel empty and annoying to navigate, and the visceral combat system is bogged down by vague progression and terrible animation work.
It’s hard to put it any other way. The devs were so focused on whether they could, they never stopped to think if they should.
Is The Relic: First Guardian Worth It?
Only on sale
Priced at a respectable $49.99, it’s unlikely you’ll regret grabbing this game on sale. I’d still wait for a discount if I were you, though. The game’s got a ton of quirks baked into its DNA — little execution hiccups that keep its cool ideas and mechanically interesting systems from reaching their full potential. Buying on sale gives you the breathing room to enjoy the game, flaws and all.
Does it have character creation?
No, The Relic: First Guardian does not have a traditional character creation system. You take on the role of a set protagonist and can’t change your appearance outside of equipment.
Does it have stamina and poise?
Yes. It features a unique stamina system for defense and a posture-breaking mechanic for enemies, though it removes stamina consumption from attacks. Keep hitting enemies and they’ll eventually stagger.
The Bottom Line
Going back to the question I opened with — what happens when someone deliberately tries to subvert something as well-established as the Soulslike genre — all I can say is this: trying to fix what isn’t broken either gives the world something it has never seen, or something it would rather not see. In The Relic: First Guardian’s case, I think the answer’s already pretty obvious.
The Relic: First Guardian delivers a below average experience with a score of 64/100.