The Relic: First Guardian is a dark action RPG built around fast, aggressive combat and a world drawn from Korean mythology. Made by a roughly twelve-person team at Project Cloud Games over six years, it drops you into the ruined realm of Arsilthus as its last Guardian, tasked with recovering fragments of a shattered great relic and putting tragic bosses to rest.
Quick answer: The game is out now on Xbox Series X|S, PC (Steam), and PS5. Its core hook is combat where attacks cost no stamina, so stamina is spent only on defense, while magic runs on cooldowns.
Platforms, price, and where to buy
The Relic: First Guardian released on July 30, 2026 on Steam and PS5, with an Xbox version following. It is a single-player game published by Perp Games (the publishing arm of Perpetual Europe) and developed by Project Cloud Games.
| Platform | Storefront | Note |
|---|---|---|
| PC | Steam | $34.99 base price |
| PS5 | PlayStation Store | Published under PERPETUAL |
| Xbox Series X|S | Microsoft Store | Available now |
On Steam, a promotion cuts the price by 35% to $22.74, an offer that ends October 7. You can buy it on the Steam store page, the Xbox listing, or the PlayStation Store. A single add-on, The Night of the Unextinguished Flame, is sold separately for $9.99.
The PC build lists an Intel i5-11400 or Ryzen 7 4800H processor and 16 GB of RAM as the minimum, with the same 16 GB recommendation and support for 21:9 ultrawide displays. English carries full audio, and the game ships with subtitles in French, German, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
How combat works: attacks cost nothing, defense costs stamina
The combat system flips the usual stamina economy. Your normal attacks draw on no resource at all, so you can keep swinging and chaining combos without watching a bar drain. Stamina exists only for high-stakes defense, meaning dodges and blocks. High-power magic sits apart from both, running on cooldowns and its own dedicated meter.
The trade-off is intensity. Because there is no attack cost to manage, the pressure moves to knowing when to spend stamina on evasion and when to lean into an all-out onslaught. Melee flows into rapid dual-blade combos and beam arts, and elemental projectiles factor into how you open and close distance against faster foes.
The Brutals: up to 80 tragic bosses
Bosses are the centerpiece. The game features up to 80 encounters, called Brutals, each framed as a standalone folktale tied to a tragic backstory that ends only when you win. The pitch is that no two fight the same way, so a strategy that beats one is no guarantee against the next.
Early footage shows several named Brutals, each in a different setting. Defeating them yields Fragments of a Distorted Soul, Corrupted Magic Crystals, and Relic Energy.
| Boss | Setting |
|---|---|
| Selvarn, the Gilded Wretch | Coin-covered cavern |
| Erdian, the Broken Vow | Pale multi-limbed behemoth |
| Vermion, the Gilded Arbiter | Cathedral hall (marked “Brutal”) |
| The Unreturned | Moss-covered dark chamber |
| Dix, the Fallen Heir | Arena lit by red fires |
| Arden, the Mad Paladin | Murky subterranean hall |
Weapons and progression: relics instead of levels
There is no traditional leveling. Your power comes entirely from the gear and Relics you find. Relics carry over 70 unique passive effects that change combat tempo and skills, and you can swap them freely to retune a build on the fly.
Weapons are split across five masteries, and no two weapons in the game are duplicates. Each is a one-off with its own history, so finding a new one also uncovers a piece of the world’s past. Every weapon feeds into specialized skill trees powered by relic energy, unlocking passives and ultimate abilities.
- Sword & Shield
- Battle Staff
- Daggers
- Two-Handed Weapons
- Longsword
Exploration ties into all of this. Arsilthus is a semi-open, interconnected world of ruins, hidden dungeons, and atmospheric regions, and venturing off the main path rewards you with artifacts, secret encounters, and lore. The game also includes 37 Steam achievements.
The setting: a shattered Arsilthus
The great relic’s destruction lies at the heart of the world’s collapse. A void consumed once-prosperous Arsilthus, transforming it into a land of death. Relics preserve the lingering hopes and feelings of its former inhabitants; collect these fragments to seal the void and restore the realm. You play a pre-designed, hooded Guardian who wields the greatswords, axes, daggers, and magic shown in combat.
The tone leans hard into dark fantasy. It carries a Mature rating for violence, blood and gore, and language.
Reception and current state
Reviews have landed mixed to unfavorable. On Steam, user reviews sit at Mixed, with 44% of 171 reviews positive overall. On PS5, the store shows an average of 2.48 out of five across 944 ratings, and critic aggregation trends toward the low-to-mid range. Reviewers repeatedly praise the art direction, the weighty combat sound design, and the boss concepts, while criticizing clunky animations, camera handling, thin storytelling, and performance problems including frame-rate drops.
Project Cloud Games has been patching heavily since launch, with well over a dozen updates released and more in progress, focused on technical issues and performance. If you buy in now, expect a game that swings for ambitious ideas but is still being stabilized.
Several reviewers suggest waiting for a sale and for further patches before diving in, particularly on console, where stuttering has been a recurring complaint.
Taken together, The Relic: First Guardian is a small-team action RPG with a distinctive combat rhythm, a large roster of tragic bosses, and a relic-driven build system that replaces leveling entirely. Whether it clicks for you depends on how much you value that ambition against the rough edges the ongoing patches are still working through.
