The Relic: First Guardian Review

From a distance, The Relic: First Guardian looks like it could be a solid addition to the growing ranks of B-list action games that punch above their weight. The sort of recommendation you drop your friends who are looking for something to scratch that itch between big games to let them know you’re into this action-game lifestyle, for real. Upclose, The Relic is the exact opposite. It’s clearly inspired by bigger games within and around the FromSoftware lineage, but doesn’t even come close to meeting the high bars they set. It doesn’t even execute its own goals well – shoddy and broken throughout, barely propped up by its engaging combat and let down by how lackluster or straight up unacceptable every other piece of it is.

Visually, The Relic does not make a good first impression nor does it make a great impression at any point afterward. Most character models are bland, either run-of-the-mill medieval European fantasy peasants, knights, and preachers; or designs bizarre enough to be curious but feeling incomplete like your Bloodborne Doll stand-in, Elisa. Faces, and especially your protagonist's mug, seem to have no actual detail on them, short of eyes that glow sometimes. And they all have a sort of low-res fuzz surrounding them akin to the infamous bloom effect from the old Fable games.

The lands you explore have the mood of a dead world with how most of its settlements are ghost towns and all of its fortresses are ruins, and yet they all look nearly identical from one crumbling building to another. The few towns that do still have people in them feel almost indistinguishable from one another. The mix of geography and whatever hazy color filter is fogging everything up is the biggest indicator of which of the three main regions you’re in. The Faded Mist Forest is a dense hinterland with a minty green tint. Hillsbrad has that yellow glow like American movies in the 2010s set in foreign countries, lathered over its rolling hills while a vomit emoji green tint covers its swamps. These color filters get oppressive in burning villages, where everything has an orangey red glow that makes details like pathways to progress hard to find and the overall image quality look smudged. Then you have caves that artificially narrow your field of view by darkening the edges of the screen, really testing your peripheral vision.

I did find exploring the regions to be occasionally intriguing, so long as I could avoid getting stuck on random geometry or loading waist deep into the ground at a checkpoint. There is genuine intrigue in finding a promising cave mouth or walking up a flight of stairs into a mysterious tower, which would only lead an elevator to bring you back down from the top. But sometimes it results in time spent trying to understand how a fast travel point ended up completely embedded inside a wall to be inaccessible and completely useless. It’s very easy to get pulled away from main paths and into side quests or dungeons around the corner because records left behind by lost or fallen characters. These dot the countryside, leading you into points of interest like a breadcrumb trail. These often reveal stories of loss told by your character making Batman-like deductions based on some sort of noteworthy thing in the environment like a broken cart, or told in the voice of the characters involved who conveniently left progressively revealing notes behind right before their demise. Seriously, I know every game does a version of this kind of storytelling, but The Relic really abuses this particular storytelling technique with a frequency and reckless abandon I don’t think I've seen before.

[It's] shoddy and broken throughout, barely propped up by its engaging combat. Many of these side stories, based on Korean folklore, are somewhat compelling, even moving at times. A memorable one involved a woman running out to the forest to find her husband who hadn’t returned home with the other soldiers from a battle. When you retrace her steps, you find that her grief had turned her into a monster (an admittedly common trope The Relic leans on to punctuate these stories with boss fights). They don’t all end with a bang, though. One story had me trek up a mountain reading scraps of notes from a wife waiting for her husband to return as their daughter gets more and more anxious, playing with pinwheels to pass the time. At the top of the climb was just a grassy plateau, filled almost hauntingly with pinwheels presumably left there by a daughter who eventually stopped waiting. I liked the rare occasions when a story resolved in a subversive way, and was disappointed when these kinds of stories had boss fights wedged into them awkwardly.

The side stories and dungeon bosses are the best way to get loot of any meaningful value in The Relic. The rolling hills, deep forests, and dank dungeons of its world have hundreds of shiny little loot markers scattered into every nook and cranny, and almost all of them are just a scant pile of 30 to 50 gold. You’ll sometimes find chests guarded by bad guys or tucked at the end of a divergent path in a cave, and almost all of them have about 600 gold. If you’re thinking, “That's weirdly specific,” well, so did I for about 20 hours until I stopped touching any of those all together since I was already carrying more gold than I could responsibly spend by the third act. As someone who genuinely enjoys clearing activities and map markers in games, my 30-or-so hours with The Relic is the first time I can remember being turned off at the idea of getting loot all together.

That said, many of these stories are often overwritten and put together in a strange way that suggests it was essentially put through translation software without any other linguistic touch or localization effort. This goes for most dialogue as well; whenever I think a shopkeeper or guard whose conversation I’m eavesdropping on is done, more lines of dialogue keep pouring out clumsily. The text in the captions also regularly don’t match what you hear coming from voice lines, and this is made even worse by the generally poor voice performances across the board – I almost couldn’t believe that some of the takes I heard made it into the final game.

Fighting the looters and monsters that roam the land is where The Relic is at its most cohesive, but thats a relatively low bar that it barely clears. Each of the five available weapons are distinct from one another; while each one only has one combo string, you can’t just mash it out since each subsequent swing requires the proper timing. The sluggish responsiveness from the controls make this rhythm a chore to lock down in the early game, and I found myself dropping strings that felt right even after some practice. Only your defensive options cost stamina, encouraging you to be aggressive more freely – however, enemies rarely stagger or flinch from attacks , so you’ll spend plenty of time waiting for openings anyway. Like you, enemies can be stunned when they’ve run out of stamina through either your attacks or when you parry theirs, but it’s frustrating that they don’t have visible stamina bars so you’ll never know how close they are to a full stagger until it happens.

Each of the three regions (with the second being split into two subregions) have their own roster of key bad guys specific to them, but none of the regular fodder test your skills all that regularly on their own. In packs, they can present moments where you need to think tactically to minimize harm – archers hiding behind a double-wide brute with an axe become priority targets for your own self-recharging elemental spell bolt, for example. Groups of monsters are the most dangerous when they join the fray, due in part to the janky lock-on system and jittery camera becoming woefully unreliable. Foes can trap you and wear you down partially because you can't switch between targets fast enough or get a read on what’s going on, but that doesn’t necessarily negate actual interesting encounter design.

With the exception of a few standouts like a weird cultist who holds a brazier on his head or some unfortunate cave dwellers with mining equipment for heads, enemies don’t have the visual appeal worthy of a top tier grimdark fantasy world. They feel like they’re trying to be like some other creatures in a FromSoftware game or ape the twisted nature of that aesthetic. After a while, they just become annoyances, neither valuable for farming materials since they only drop middling amounts of gold, only good for buying basic items or low-level crafting items that I could just go buy somewhere. By the late game, I would do my best to completely avoid them out in the world, running past them to the next checkpoint while in dungeons as I ran out of patience for their nonsense.

Bosses have a bit more going for them in both these respects, as their attacks create way more of a puzzle to solve and generally look more detailed and more interesting then run of the mill mooks. But these fights are also where I had to employ the most tedious tactics in order to avoid the cheapest deaths. There are a lot of bosses – over 75 to be clear, and most of them are optional. The worst of these take advantage of The Relic’s aforementioned technical woes while also having to contend with environmental hazards, status effects they cheese on you, or relentless offense that you can’t reliably interrupt. A handful of these fights also just break completely in weird ways. For example, the boss just stopped moving completely in one of these fights, awed by my desperate dodge rolling, I’m sure. In another, the boss would sometimes just not show up at all when I respawned, leaving me in an empty room that they could occasionally fire into, which I couldn't leave without reloading my entire session.

As a consolation, weapon skills really spice up combat, adding some punchy offensive and defensive options into the mix. The more skills you unlock for each weapon, the more complete they feel with a more fleshed out moveset, and each weapon has a two-sided skill tree that firmly divides them into even more distinct playstyles. The battle staff is a good example of this, with one side making you a dangerous whirlwind in melee and the other giving you some very powerful ranged options that almost fills the role of a traditional mage. However, the massive amount of relic points required to unlock all these skills on any one path will make it hard to see the full scope of a style before very late game. You can’t grind these points either, as they only come as either rewards from certain boss fights or some quests, or can be found at specific blue shrines out in the world. With an item that is really easy to come by, you can refund any points invested and respec as you see fit. I did this many times in order to try out or switch between different playstyles if I thought a new approach was needed to get through a new boss.

Everything about this experience, including its combat, is marred in some way by its own shambolic state. Equipment have passive abilities and drawbacks, some of which have pronounced effects on combat. One of the two-handed weapons lowers the stamina cost of blocking while raising the cost to dodge. A battle staff has a small chance of replenishing all of your cooldowns when you connect with a skill. Relics are stones that modify or enhance your stats, and add an extra layer of customization. With some outside the box thinking, these can bring flair to your builds, which worked well enough to where I didn’t care much that there is no regular stat progression or leveling up at all. Most relics are basic, raising hit points or stamina, bolstering defenses, and so on, but some can offer some unique features like temporary invincibility when you take fatal damage. There's a pair of relics that interact with special attacks that seem like they would be a cool combo, but like most of the sloppy design in The Relic, it didn’t explain which special attacks they applied to or even what special attacks are at all.