The Relic: First Guardian review

Every so often a game arrives that makes you appreciate all other games. The Relic: First Guardian, developed by Project Cloud Games and published by Perp Games, is that kind of experience. It was delayed from May to buy itself time for more polish, but that polish is nowhere to be found. This is, hands down, my top contender for worst game of 2026. Even the trailers for this game looked rough, and trailers are supposed to make games look hype and appealing!

The narrative is as basic as it gets. The Great Relic that protected the kingdom of Arsiltus has shattered, a void has swallowed the land, and you play the last guardian, tasked to recover the fragments and stitch the world back together. It’s boilerplate dark fantasy.

The game leans on voiced dialogue that triggers as you move through the world, and the implementation is baffling. Voice lines pop in seemingly at random with no way to skip them, and while a character is speaking, the game refuses your inputs entirely. Let that sink in. You can be mid-fight, an enemy winding up behind you, and the game will hold your controls hostage until someone finishes a monologue you didn't ask for. 

Marketing and appearances suggest a Soulslike, so let me clear this up first: it’s not one, and I don’t mean that as a compliment or an insult, just a fact worth knowing before you spend money. There’s a stamina bar, but it’s only for dodging and sprinting. Attacks cost nothing, so you can swing nonstop. You also drop no currency on death, so there’s no corpse run and no tension in dying beyond time wasted. I feel the developers just wanted to use the term Soulslike as a marketing gimmick, but it’s actually more hack and slash.

The main problem is that the action itself is a mess. Your dodge is a dash rather than a roll, and it flings you absurd distances, frequently past the enemy and sometimes off a ledge. Dodge is mapped to the X button, which feels wrong from minute one, and you cannot remap anything. Worse, the on-screen prompts are simply incorrect in places. The game told me skills were on L2 plus a face button. They are on L1.

Combat readability is dire too. The camera work is absolutely atrocious, with particle effects that smother the screen, and enemies can chain you into stunlocks. Maybe it's a Souslike after all! There’s a stagger bar on enemies, and once you deplete it, nothing happens, even though you can usually perform a critical or visceral attack in other games. You just keep mashing until they stand up again. 

Progression is also very un-RPG-like. There are no character levels and no experience points. Instead, you spend gold on nodes in skill trees tied to each of the five weapon types, and you equip relics earned from boss kills to modify your abilities. You can pay a guy 600 gold a million times to increase your health permanently, but what the game doesn’t tell you is that it’s a one time thing, so you can technically waste millions of gold and for a one-time health increase. Talk about great quality control!

The in-game economy strangles exploration. Enemies drop gold and nothing else. Treasure chests, almost without exception, contain gold (some contain weapons or armor). So every reward in the game funnels into a single currency. Why fight that enemy? Gold. Why explore that side path? A chest of gold. Why open the chest at all? Why bother fighting enemies at all? The relics themselves at least offer some build variety, and I found a couple of combinations I liked.

Once you have bought out the skill tree for your preferred weapon, the gold keeps flowing and loses meaning. The plethora of bosses is the only content left, and the game boasts that it has more than 80, but quantity is not the same as quality. Not once did I care about any boss's “tragic” backstory or lore.

Technical performance and polish in this game are pretty much nonexistent. The frame rate stutters constantly, and I mean constantly. Controls turn unresponsive sometimes and there is no performance mode or graphics mode, just one setting that fails at both jobs.

Then there are the painstakingly long load times, coming in at 30 plus seconds. This is a 42 GB game on a PlayStation 5, a console whose SSD was the centerpiece of its marketing. But this isn’t the hardware’s fault, it’s the optimization. A real percentage of your playtime is spent staring at loading screen art that reeks of AI. 

The world of Arsiltus is blanketed in a thick mist, and I suspect it’s doing double duty as atmosphere and as a curtain, because everything the fog reveals is a letdown. The visuals are blurry, textures pop in late and often, and both environments and enemies are reused. The UI is filled with tiny text, erratic paragraph spacing, and who knows, maybe the writing itself was AI-generated too! In the audio department, some areas are completely silent, no ambience, no score, nothing, as if the sound file simply was not hooked up. Other sections blast at you beyond loud. 

I kept waiting for The Relic: First Guardian to become a passable game, but it never did. Sure, there might be some fragments of good ideas buried in here, but the execution fails at nearly every layer: performance, controls, camera, gameplay, and presentation. The cherry on top is that they decided to charge $49.99 for this mess.