Game Overview and Setting

The Relic: First Guardian is an action-RPG developed by Project Cloud Games, a small Korean studio supported by Perp Games. The game features an open world, nearly 80 bosses, and a dark reinterpretation of Korean folklore, inspired by Soulslike games. It is priced at 50€ and marks the first major project from the studio.

Story and Gameplay Concept

The story takes place in Arsiltus, a medieval-fantasy world once protected by the Great Relic, which was destroyed, allowing the Void to spread and corrupt the land. The player assumes the role of the First Guardian, an amnesiac awakened by Elisa, a mysterious woman who seems to share a past with him. The goal is to find the fragments of the Great Relic, confront the Brutals, and restore order.

Combat System and Mechanics

The combat system centers on parrying with a generous timing window, but attacks deal little damage. Players must fill an invisible dizziness bar by chaining parries and then strike with special skills. Stamina is used only for defending, dodging, or parrying, and attacking does not consume it. Ordinary enemies do not reappear after being defeated, and players do not lose experience or resources upon death.

World Design and Exploration

The game offers three large regions: the Misty Forest, Hillsbrad, and the Valemar Crownlands. Exploration can be enjoyable when discovering a dungeon, a tower, or a camp. However, the world often feels too large for its content, with similar villages, reused assets, and rewards that lack interest. Players find small chests with 30 to 40 gold pieces and larger ones with about 600 gold, but enemies do not provide much useful loot.

Audio and Immersion Issues

The music and atmospheres generally hold up, but the voices of many characters, including secondary NPCs, seem to be dubbed by a voice or robotic artificial voice. Performances are flat, sometimes incomprehensible, and the subtitles do not always match what is heard. In a game that relies on emotion and folklore, this breaks a large part of the immersion.

Boss Battles and Difficulty

The game highlights its nearly 80 bosses, which are both its greatest promise and its greatest trap. Some confrontations stand out, such as a cursed knight or a lightning sorcerer in a cemetery, but most are similar, with many bandits, man versus man duels, and bosses with a single phase and few moves to learn. The difficulty peaks are sometimes artificial, with one-shot attacks, curses that prevent healing, and buggy final bosses that prevent the use of healing items.

Artistic Direction and Technical Issues

The artistic direction is solid, with beautiful things to see, including certain panoramas, bosses, and ruins that emit a real atmosphere of Korean dark fantasy. However, the technical aspects often spoil the picture: thick fog, oppressive colored filters, marked aliasing, approximate textures, dated NPC models, undetailed faces, and almost absent facial animations. The performance is the worst aspect, with very violent drops, sometimes under 10 frames per second, regular slowdowns, and painful load times.

Narrative and Control Issues

The game's narrative is confusing, with many notes, memories, and dialogues that do not coalesce into a coherent whole. The texts sometimes appear poorly translated, the subtitles do not always match the voices, and the characters lack presence. The initial idea is interesting, but the execution is much less so. The game's controls sometimes lack responsiveness, with animations that are long and some skills that trap players in a sequence they cannot cancel. Target locking is unstable, and the camera gets stuck in the scenery, especially in narrow or cluttered arenas. Players can lose sight of an opponent, take an unreadable hit, and then die without understanding why.