The Relic: First Guardian Hands-On: A Boss-Heavy Soulslike

The world is already in ruins when The Relic: First Guardian hands you the controller. The Great Relic has been destroyed, Arsilutus has been swallowed by the Void, and the men and monsters left behind spend their days butchering and cursing whoever survived. Your job, as the First Guardian, is to gather the broken pieces, reforge the Great Relic, and drag the land back from the edge. It is a familiar premise, and the game knows it, but it is also upfront about where it wants to plant its own flag. I got to test that promise in a recent hands-on demo, and after several hours in Arsilutus I had looted ruins, killed a small army of monsters, and slowly grown into the role.

I've put hands on just about every Souls-inspired game of the last couple of decades, so I walked in knowing exactly what this kind of timing-based combat is supposed to feel like. That experience colors everything I'm about to describe. First Guardian is honest about its inspirations and clear about the identity it's chasing, and the early signs point to a dark, dangerous world with a lot of small stories to tell. It starts, fittingly, with fire and screams.

Dead Men Do Tell Tales

After a short tutorial march through a cave, the real adventure opens outside a burning house. A woman is crying somewhere inside the engulfed stone cottage, so I smash through the crates blocking the door to reach her. I'm too late. She dies from her injuries before I can do anything, and the glittering lights scattered around the wreckage pull my attention toward notes and relics instead. Each one carries a fragment: a family attacked, a refusal to let the attackers in, a home set ablaze in retaliation. Piece by piece, the scene tells its own story without a single cutscene.

There is a lot of storytelling in The Relic: First Guardian, and almost none of it arrives the way you would expect. The central plot stays in the background. Instead, every corner of Arsilutus has already lived through something. A town wiped out by a vengeful father. A group that kept delaying their escape from an approaching threat until delay was no longer an option. These vignettes are fully voiced, which gives them an almost playable-audiobook quality, yet they never swell into bloated audiolog dumps. They land as quick snapshots, small narrative mosaics waiting to be assembled. Many are said to draw from Asian folklore, and as someone who has burned far too many hours on VaatiVidya and My Name is Byf lore videos, that hook works on me completely. Yes, I want to know about the man sealed in the collapsed ruins by friends who, though dead, still came back for him.

The map is a semi-open world, which here means freely explorable but kept on a leash. Areas run a little tighter, edges are walled off by high cliffs, and the overall flow leans forward and back with branches peeling off along the way. There is no breadcrumb trail nagging you toward an objective, so I spent a lot of time just following a faint road to see where it ended. Glowing yellow stones etched with runes offer Tibelle's Blessing, which works exactly like a bonfire or a site of grace: it restores health, refills the Breath of Esser healing item, and sets your respawn point. I leaned on those respawns more than I'd like to admit, and a few of them double as fast-travel anchors.

Sword and Spell

Out in that world, everything from common bandits to the twisted creatures called Brutals wants you dead. The demo handed me a sword and shield, and the basics felt instantly familiar: attack, block, parry, dodge. The twist is what's missing. There is no heavy attack. That slot belongs to magic instead, and in my case it was a heavy ball of flame that hit hard, especially once enemies caught fire and kept burning. Magic runs on a cooldown rather than a mana bar, so I could lean on it without rationing power before a big fight. Stamina exists too, but it doesn't drain when you swing. That sounds minor. It isn't. Not having to keep energy in reserve while you press an opening genuinely changes how aggressive you can be.

This is a Soulslike in a deeper sense than the label usually implies. The combat is a throwback that reaches back to Dark Souls, maybe even Demon's Souls. Fast-twitch reflexes and perfectly chained dodges are not what win fights here. Timing is. Swings take time. So do dodges and blocks. Blow the timing and the animation locks you in just long enough to miss your window or eat a hit you should have read. Whether that excites you or worries you comes down to taste, and I'll be honest, it does skew a touch clunky. Still, I respect what it's reaching for. Being good isn't about mashing attacks and reacting on instinct. It's about recognizing the right tool and using it.

If you want to see how that atmosphere and pacing read in motion, PlayStation's Story and Exploration showcase trailer is the clearest look at Arsilutus so far. It runs through the kind of moody exploration and grim set pieces the demo is built around.

The bosses are where First Guardian plants its flag hardest. There are more than 70 of them, and each one reads like a combat puzzle waiting to be solved. I met Branko, the Bloodstained Shield, inside a burning chapel: a massive warrior swinging a towering axe behind an equally towering shield. Blocking his onslaught left me wide open, and he moved fast enough that I could barely sneak in a single counter after his combos. It took a pile of deaths before the answer clicked. This was a test of patience. Parrying his blows saved my stamina and bled his, and once his stance finally broke I could punish him. The win came from staying patient and trusting that read.

Then came Entom the Starved, hunched over a pile of human flesh, and the puzzle flipped entirely. His best offense was unblockable charges and leaping crashes from above, so patience gave way to dodging: slip the charge, chip in a quick combo, slip the next one. Different boss, different solution. The variety in design holds up too, from Branko's hulking frame to Entom's blood-soaked gluttony to the clean swordplay of the knight Mog. And every one of them carries a story told through the relics on the way in. Mog was meant to stand against the Brutal but fled and abandoned his allies, and the path to him is haunted by specters of his pride and remorse. Entom's tale hit hardest: a sick young man cured by an old stranger, only for the cure to twist him into a thing that devoured his own village, parents included.

Relics Over Levels

Progression throws out a couple of genre staples. There is no straightforward level-up, no attribute screen, and no pile of souls dropped every time you die. What you equip is what defines you. Beating bosses can hand you Relics, and while you can only slot a few early on, that ceiling rises over time. They carry meaningful bonuses: the Memory of the Meal Left Behind, pulled from Entom's corpse, heals me a little every time I kill something, while armor like the Shroud of Cowardly Survival from Mog buffs stamina and cooldown speed. The build is the character.

Weapons are the exception to all of that. I stuck with the trusty sword and shield, but there are Two-Handed Weapons, a Battle Staff, a Dagger, and a Long Sword on offer, and each one, along with your magic, has its own upgrade tree fed by Ancient Relic Energy you find while exploring. Those trees unlock buffs and new moves, like the Focus strike that launches you into an uppercut slash and back down into a diving cleave, the kind of thing Ryu Hayabusa would be proud of. The weapons are all one of a kind, and a blacksmith will sharpen their potential further in exchange for coins and materials.

Several hours in, I came away in good shape. The Relics I'd stacked had stretched my health bar well past where it started, my parry timing had me carving through camps and caves, and the scattered lore kept filling the quiet stretches with a rich little anthology of small tragedies. Mostly, I just wanted to find the next boss and crack it open. You'll be able to see how all of it holds together when The Relic: First Guardian launches on July 31 for PC and PS5.