The Relic: First Guardian Review

Taking inspiration from Korean mythology, featuring 80 bosses and promising fast, brutal combat, it’s no wonder that there was a bit of buzz in the Soulslike fandom for The Relic: First Guardian. It certainly sounded promising at the time. Unfortunately what released is a bit of an unfinished mess that you should probably avoid until there’s been a salvo of patches to sort it all out.

We’ll start with the positives. The mix of Korean folklore is cool and comes with some pretty distinct environments and enemies, whose designs can be pretty interesting. Also enemies don’t seem to respawn when you go to the game’s equivalent of bonfires, which is great, you don’t lose progress, though you also end up with empty areas afterwards.

The combat system itself has some good ideas as well. It’s a stamina-based system, but your attacks mostly don’t use your stamina, your defences do, so you can be pretty aggressive provided you’re careful. It feels a bit more forgiving than having to commit a bunch of stamina every time you try to attack. This is clearest when fighting bosses, which can feel less reactive and more proactive in battle.

Beyond this, however, there is little to recommend. It really does feel unfinished or unrefined, and considering that the dev team boasts only a dozen members to craft this semi-open world and fill it with 80 bosses, it feels as though they have been overly ambitious.

There’s jarring elements to the game where they’ve made compromises. At anything faster than the slowest of all walks, your character uses the same animation for movement, but plays it at different speeds. If you push the analog just slightly past a walk, it switches to this animation that is running far too fast for your movement speed, which looks ridiculous and shatters any immersion you might have wanted. The only time the animation matches is at a full sprint.

Then there’s dialogue, which is all over the place. When you’re talking to someone, they usually state the same thing more than once is subtly different ways, even merchants who you just want to shut up so you can buy stuff from them. When you hear people talking nearby, they stop and start again when you go in and out of audio range, and more importantly it stops you from interacting with things. So basically, if you’re near some people who are talking, you can’t open a chest or anything until they stop, and you can’t skip their lines either.

The NPCs themselves are ridiculous as well. They’ll often stand there repeating the exact same distinct gesture ad infinitum, which is a bit silly. They’re worse in a burning village early in the game, though, where the panicked and screaming villagers can be clearly seen from a distance just standing calmly, waiting for you to be in a certain radius before they can begin their dramatic death scene. It ruins the effect, to say the least, like going through the Pasaje del Terror in Blackpool if it didn’t have walls and you could see Hellraiser in the next room taking a smoke break – smoke which presumably then leaks from his nail holes.

Uh, where was I? Oh, right. Some of the world and level design is strange. For example, there’s an area early on that has a Tibelle’s Blessing – this game’s bonfire-equivalent – with some NPCs, then a big long lengthy sprint down to an area that’s also got NPCs in it, but lacks a Blessing before you continue on to find enemies to fight and things to do. If you die before the next Blessing, you’ll respawn with a pointless trek down here again before you can return to where you were. There’s always this kind of backtracking through the world in Soulslikes, but this is a particularly apparent waste of time that the genre has broadly shifted away from.

Much more care was put into the boss fights, it feels like, as they have ended up being decently designed and enjoyable. Whilst they’re not particularly remarkable, they do stick out against the backdrop of unfinished roughness as the strongest part of the game.

But then there’s the biggest problem of all: I lost my save game. I just booted the game up one day and the file wouldn’t load anymore, so I had to restart and traipse back through these issues and boss battles, which was enough to make me lose what little interest had survived the roughness of playing the first time. I would hope that this kind of save wipe has been stamped out through the 17 patches that Project Cloud Games has released since launch, and they have addressed a number of peripheral issues and bugs, but this will require more fundamental work to improve things like the awfully distracting movement animations.