To be a developer with a penchant for the souls genre is a dangerous thing, if you ask me. To occupy the same space as Miyazaki’s work is one thing.
But you also have fresh modern problems to factor in, such as the abundance of Soulslikes saturating the market. The amount of good Soulslikes genuinely competing with FromSoft, raising the bar. Plus, the huge decision you have to face. Do you innovate, or piggyback on Souls predecessors?
I can say now that, to The Relic: First Guardian’s credit. It boldly decides to do the latter. Opting for the lesser-seen semi-open world format, not too far removed from Elden Ring, and a more fast-paced action-RPG feel to combat.
In a word, it’s ambitious. But while pressure like that can make diamonds. It can also do the opposite and serve as an offensive, low-rent assault on those who adore the genre.
My sadistic Souls-loving friends. I’m afraid this one does not endure the pressure to form a diamond. It’s coal. Coal is all you get.
Fragments Of A Story
To let you behind the curtain, I usually begin with something positive, or at least neutral, and get more punchy as I go. But with this one, I am in the rare and unfortunate situation where I have no praise to offer this game. So, we’ll just let the sparks fly.
The Relic: First Guardian is a pretty cookie-cutter premise as far as Souls games go. Which isn’t always a nail in the coffin, but it really depends on the environmental storytelling that comes thereafter.
You are the titular ‘first Guardian’. Brought back to this mortal coil to take care of the Brutals. Those corrupted by the power of The Relic, using fragments of this corrupted entity to harness power, going mad in the process. In short, get all the fragments, save the world. Or, perhaps use them all for your own evil schemes, in true souls’ fashion.
Rarely have I encountered such an overwhelming emptiness when exploring an ‘expansive’ open world.
That, for me, was a solid enough premise to get off the start line. You have the motivation to fight the litany of bosses the game has in store, and you have a clear, albeit one-dimensional role to play. Usually, that and a big bonk stick is all I need.
But, even for a Soulslike, I couldn’t quite get over how haphazardly this game tries, and I emphasise tries, to deliver a narrative.
Rarely have I heard voice lines delivered as monotone and wooden as those featured here. Rarely have I encountered a quest system quite as phoned-in as this. Rarely have I encountered such an overwhelming emptiness when exploring an ‘expansive’ open world.
Quests play out as a series of notes usually spaced meters apart, with enemies dotted between to pad each out, and not one of them has an ounce of substance, an ounce of emotive narrative, or a modicum of creativity. I loathe to breathe any life into the medium of AI, but without hyperbole, GPT would have been on par in the writers’ room here.
The only thing I will commend is that every line is voiced, which is rather impressive. The performances do raise the question: would nothing at all have been better? But the volume of lines voiced did raise an eyebrow.
It’s such a shame really, as the narrative presentation is, in most cases, a minor feature of a Souls game, provided you deliver the bare minimum. This attempt doesn’t even come close to delivering a passing grade. Something that serves as the subsiding foundation for the rest of this mess.
Boring, As Far As The Eye Can See
As mentioned, The Relic: First Guardian is a semi-open world, split into three regions, allowing players to effectively go off in any direction, carve their own path, and engage with anything they like as and when they choose.
This is absolutely the case. The issue is that, with a world this devoid of anything interesting, it begs the question. Why would you want to?
Firstly, we need to address the fact that the game runs appallingly badly, even on my PS5 Pro, which has a little more juice to keep things smooth. The frame rate stutters were constant, and the pop-ins were laughably bad even with an equally comical fog working to shroud this lack of rendering. Silent Hill on PS1 can get away with that, but it’s 2026, people.
Lighting and weather effects would change so fast you could get meteorological whiplash. Visibility was constantly compromised. Animations range from basic to genuinely absent as enemies would float back to their spawn point. Plus, the game’s camera simply cannot deal with enclosed spaces at all, leading to mindless, blind attacking in the hope of survival.
All of these issues which is by no means a comprehensive list, by the way. Yet the game looks like a PS3-era game. The NPCs wouldn’t look out of place in the original Dark Souls, environments are far from eye-catching, nor are they in any way distinct from one another. But above all, the biggest sin of this open world is just how bland and empty it feels.
The game has upwards of 100 quests, over 70 bosses, and lots of landmarks on the map. Yet, you could run in a straight line for minutes and get the same effect as running up the endless staircase in Mario 64.
Open world games are meant to fill you with a sense of wonder and discovery. Even at their worst, they should fill you with an overwhelming sense of choice paralysis. But when inhabiting this one, I felt nothing. Unless you count frustration, rage, and restlessness.
Now Arriving At Gank Central
I’ve played enough lukewarm and downright terrible Soulslikes to know that, even if they are lacking, there’s usually still something you can get out of them. They might have a derivative or dull story. They might have a world devoid of anything interesting. But, usually, as long as the combat achieves the status of ‘harsh but fair’, a Souls fan like me will struggle through.
That’s why it pains me to say that The Relic doesn’t even manage to do that, as the combat is certainly harsh. But it’s far from fair.
The irony is that, when you take away all the artificial, poor design-based difficulty, the combat is relatively easy. The parry window is huge, and the attacks are rudimentary without even a light and heavy assortment. So, in theory, there’s no reason why a seasoned Souls player wouldn’t take to The Relic with ease.
…the combat is certainly harsh. But it’s far from fair.
The problem is that the game is built in such a way that it works against the player in the most frustrating, artificial ways at every turn. Leading to cheap deaths in abundance.
Enemy animations outright ignore your attacks at times to break your flow. Status effects are ridiculously aggressive and unbalanced. But most egregiously of all, if you’re fighting more than one enemy, you might as well be fighting Consort Radahn, because you’re going down, and going down fast.
Groups swarm on you, chaining attacks and locking you in place, melting your health in seconds flat. Which only gets worse in enclosed spaces. Genuinely, I would rather every enemy was a huge, hulking boss if it meant never encountering a group again, as the gank present in this game made me wish I was playing Dolmen, Hellpoint, Thymesia. Literally anything but this.
I think the best way I can paint a picture of how unbalanced and unenjoyable moment-to-moment combat is, is to talk about the crutches the game uses to cover for it.
If a Souls game doesn’t feature Souls corpse running, that’s an indicator that having it would be too irritating for the player base. That’s forgivable to an extent. However, What’s not forgivable is that when you rest at bonfires in this game, enemies don’t respawn.
This leads to a war of attrition where you take a few down, die, and repeat until you break through that brick wall. Because it’s not a test of skill, it’s a test of patience, and I lost mine time and time again.
What In The Wukong Are You Doing?
So far, The Relic is batting zero, but in the world of Soulslikes, a good boss fight can make all the difference. I’ll concede that when you’re fighting one enemy one-on-one in this game, everything does feel a lot more palatable. This gave me hope that the bosses would at least be memorable and make each area explored somewhat worthwhile.
…the gank present in this game made me wish I was playing Dolmen, Hellpoint, Thymesia. Literally anything but this.
However, I should have known better, as this game takes a leaf from Korean and Chinese Souls games of recent years. Packing oodles of bosses into the experience, but relies on quantity over quality. A surefire way to aggravate players unless you knock it out of the park with each and every one.
As you might have guessed, that didn’t happen here. The bosses are a collection of unmemorable, uninspired encounters. Some utilize status effects to make for a frustrating encounter that requires perfection. Whereas others can be given distance and picked off gradually with Relic Magic, effectively allowing you to cheese them without ever needing to lay a glove on them.
Attack patterns are easily read and memorized; the environments are often too compact for a fight to take place, taking away from the experience. Basic enemies can saunter into boss arenas in some cases to interrupt boss fights. The lingering performance issues make some boss fights hard to see.
Yet, despite the litany of issues, the boss fights were probably the best part of the whole game. But really, that’s like coming in first place in the Miss Chernobyl beauty pageant.
Death By One-Thousand Cuts
So, let’s say that you’re a good sport. A real trooper. You battle through the Brutals and the equally brutal gameplay, you let the lukewarm narrative wash over you, and you still have room in your heart to let this game in.
If that’s the case, and the horrible haymakers this game takes at you aren’t enough, there are plenty of light jabs that’ll see you off. Small irritants that culminate in an overall feeling of unbridled rage.
A design choice that baffled me and served as an irritant throughout was the choice to have gold be the driving resource ahead of souls. Something that only works if you have items worth purchasing. But, as I cleared camps and opened chests to get stacks of gold, it just kept piling up in my inventory.
It can be used to upgrade weapons and can also be used to buy relics and consumables in a pinch. But the reality is that there’s simply not enough stuff in the game for the economy to work. There are four weapon classes with five weapons each, and five pieces of armor. There’s only so many status healing items you can buy before you realize that the effort you’re putting into clearing the map simply isn’t worthwhile.
Then you have a UI that is lacking, with no indicator to show if you’ve cleared an area or not and compass that disappears randomly. You have progression issues, as the game doesn’t necessarily save at bonfires, meaning you can easily lose progress between one session and the next.
You have issues with the combat mechanics, and this could be a user issue. But for the life of me, I couldn’t get the weapon skills to work despite using the button bindings shown in the controls menu, adding more artificial difficulty to combat.
Your character runs like he’s Edward Cullen taking off at a full sprint, perhaps to make up for the largely barren environment. There’s no character creation menu, meaning you’re stuck with a copy-and-paste Dark Souls 1 default character.
You can’t interact with NPCs, checkpoints, or items while voice lines are being delivered, leading to awkward moments loitering, and, perhaps, this is a personal gripe. But the game also has the gall to add a death counter after each death. Essentially boasting that the game has conspired to kill you quite as much as it has. Of all those deaths, a fraction were due to my own ineptitude. That’s not because I’m some sort of ‘let me solo her’ pro. The game is just that poorly made.
I could probably spend eternity listing the design flaws and fumbles of The Relic. But I think I can sum up my feelings while playing pretty succinctly. Never, in all my time playing Soulslikes, has it ever felt more like a game was actively working to try and make me have a bad time. Not a challenging time that requires endurance, patience and mental fortitude. Just simply, a horrible gaming experience.
If you respect your time, if you respect the souls genre, and if you respect your mental wellbeing. Swerve The Relic: First Guardian at all costs.
The Relic: First Guardian is not only one of the worst Soulslikes I have ever played, but a prime candidate for the worst game of 2026. It's a game that crumbles under the weight of its own ambition, aiming to be the next Elden Ring and missing the target wildly. Not one aspect of this game warrants praise, and in its current state, it is an affront to the Souls genre as a whole. It's time I will never get back, but hopefully through my suffering, you won't suffer the same fate.
The Good
- Lots of bosses
- Weapon classes feel distinct
The Bad
- Abysmal visuals and performance
- Clunky, cumbersome and frustrating combat
- Lazy quest system
- Lack of build variety
- Artificially Difficult Due to poor design
