A Hollow Echo: The Troubling Reality of The Relic: First Guardian

When the review code for The Relic: First Guardian arrived, there was a palpable sense of anticipation. Developed by the ambitious, twelve-person indie team at Project Cloud Games, the title promised a "fresh take" on the action RPG genre. It touted a gritty, folklore-infused narrative set within a sprawling, Souls-like framework. Unfortunately, after sinking dozens of hours into the experience, it has become clear that the game is a cautionary tale of ambition outpacing execution. Despite the indie hustle that often earns our support, The Relic: First Guardian is a hollow experience that fails to justify its existence, let alone the time and money required to endure it.

The Premise: Folklore Lost in the Void

The narrative foundation of The Relic: First Guardian takes place in the medieval world of Arsiltus. Once a realm guarded against ravenous monstrosities by a celestial artifact known as the Great Relic, the world is plunged into darkness when said relic is shattered. The resulting "Void" consumes the land, transforming ordinary citizens into grotesque "Brutals"—the game’s primary antagonist class.

Players assume the role of an amnesiac guardian, revived by a mysterious "dark maiden" who claims to share a forgotten history with the protagonist. This setup, while classic, is where the game’s narrative potential immediately begins to wither. The journey is a vague, directionless trudge across a continent to collect fragments of the shattered relic, but the delivery is hampered by stilted, pseudo-poetic writing and an English localization that obscures rather than illuminates. The game attempts to emulate the understated, environmental storytelling popularized by FromSoftware, but instead leans into an aggressive, robotic "telling" style that strips the world of any authentic humanity.

Chronology of a Frustrating Journey

The experience of playing The Relic: First Guardian can be categorized by a repetitive, downward spiral of discovery and disappointment.

Early Impressions: The Illusion of Depth

Initially, the combat system—built around the familiar pillars of parrying and resource management—shows promise. The game offers a variety of archetypes, from two-handed longswords to magic-wielding battle staves, each with skill trees that can be toggled at the maiden. The parry-heavy combat, reminiscent of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Lies of P, provides a fleeting sense of satisfaction when the timing clicks. However, this joy is short-lived.

The Mid-Game Slump: Bloat and Repetition

As the hours pass, the lack of structure in the open-world design becomes the game’s defining feature. There is no distinction between critical path quests and side content. Players are often left throwing themselves against bosses that offer little more than a pittance of gold and a dead-end, while shimmering fog gates block progress based on obscure, undefined criteria. The "80 bosses" touted by the marketing team are, for the most part, filler. While a handful of encounters—such as a knight reminiscent of Artorias or a thunder-wielding warlock—offer brief sparks of excitement, the vast majority are forgettable duels against bandits that rely on singular move-sets.

The Final Stretch: Technical Collapse

By the final act, the game ceases to be a challenge of skill and becomes a battle against software instability. Input latency, broken quest triggers, and game-ending glitches become the norm. The final boss, in particular, was so riddled with errors that controller inputs were frequently ignored, and healing mechanics failed entirely. This is not "difficulty"; it is a systemic failure of design and quality control.

Supporting Data: By the Numbers

To understand why The Relic: First Guardian fails to land, one must look at the mechanical data underpinning the experience:

• Reward Scaling: The game lacks a meaningful economy. Whether you are in the opening hours or the final stretch, rewards remain static. A small pickup grants 30–40 gold; a major chest yields 600. Because the cost of leveling weapons scales aggressively, the player quickly realizes that the "rewards" are mathematically meaningless.
• The "Parry" Grind: Enemies possess hidden stagger bars that require excessive, repetitive parries to break. In many cases, standard attacks do negligible damage, forcing the player into a monotonous cycle of parry-parry-parry until the prompt for a special attack appears.
• Performance Metrics: On current hardware, the frame rate frequently dips into the single digits. This "Microsoft PowerPoint" presentation makes timing-based combat, such as parrying, an exercise in sheer guesswork rather than reaction.
• Asset Reuse: The environment is an endless, copy-pasted collection of generic farm villages and samey foliage. The placement of objects feels algorithmic, with trees and rocks often obstructing vital progression points, suggesting a lack of human oversight in the level design process.

The Human Element: AI and Localization

One of the most jarring aspects of the game is its reliance on AI-generated voiceovers. Rather than hiring voice actors to imbue the world with pathos, the developers opted for robotic, cold delivery. This extends to the quest-giving NPCs, who feel less like inhabitants of a dying world and more like text-to-speech programs reading a script.

When you encounter a character named "Gus" or "Taylor," only to find them transformed into a "Brutal," the intended tragedy is completely undercut by the delivery. The writing is equally problematic; it uses long, meandering, and pseudo-philosophical descriptions for items that fail to clarify their function. The developers clearly confused "vagueness" with "depth," resulting in a narrative that is difficult to engage with on any meaningful level.

Implications for the Developer and the Industry

The failure of The Relic: First Guardian serves as a stark reminder of the risks associated with the "Soulslike" boom. Developers often see the success of FromSoftware and mistakenly believe that difficulty, dark aesthetics, and vague lore are the primary ingredients for success. They overlook the meticulous level design, the tight mechanical polish, and the intentionality behind every placement of an item or enemy.

For Project Cloud Games, this is a painful lesson. By attempting to scale a project to 80 bosses, they sacrificed quality for quantity, resulting in a world that feels "soulless"—a term rarely applied to a game with such irony. The implication for the industry is clear: if an indie studio wants to compete in the crowded action RPG space, they must prioritize cohesion and polish over the "feature creep" of massive, empty maps and bloated boss counts.

Editor’s Note: A Patch Too Late

It is important to address the reality of the game’s current state. Hours before this article went to press, the publisher announced a major update intended to address the performance issues and bugs detailed in this review. However, this patch carries a significant caveat: it renders all existing save files unusable.

To review the game again in its "fixed" state would require a full 20 to 30-hour playthrough from scratch—an impossible task within the timeframe of a standard release cycle. While we hold out hope that the developers can salvage the project for future players, this review stands as an accurate representation of the product provided for evaluation. We cannot recommend a title that requires a total restart to function as intended, especially when the underlying design pillars remain fundamentally flawed.

In conclusion, The Relic: First Guardian is not a diamond in the rough; it is an unfinished, tedious, and technically broken experience that misinterprets the very genre it seeks to honor. Even for the most dedicated, masochistic fans of the genre, your time and money would be better spent elsewhere.