The Relic: First Guardian lands on Xbox Series this Friday, cheaper and patched 18 times over

Project Cloud Games' Korean-mythology soulslike hits Xbox Series X/S this Friday (Sept. 25), two months after its PS5 and PC debut, now with a permanent price cut and a Switch 2 version confirmed for October.

If you own an Xbox Series X or S and have been keeping an eye on The Relic: First Guardian since July, you can finally install it today. Publisher Perp Games and developer Project Cloud Games confirmed the game launches this Friday, September 25, as an Xbox Play Anywhere title, meaning the same purchase also covers the PC version through the Microsoft Store.

It's an open-world soulslike set in Arsilthus, a realm turned into a wasteland after a sacred relic was destroyed. The whole visual and narrative direction leans on Korean folklore and mythology, which is still a fairly rare sight in a genre so dominated by medieval European aesthetics, and that alone gives the game a bit of an edge over yet another generic soulslike.

Combat lets you pick from five weapon types and equip relics carrying over 70 different passive effects, spread across more than 80 bosses on the map. Reserving stamina purely for defense and dodging, while letting skills run on cooldowns instead of eating into any resource, reads like Project Cloud Games' deliberate attempt to dodge the same stamina-management formula every soulslike borrows from the same place.

Worth noting: this isn't technically a brand new release. The Relic: First Guardian first launched on July 31 for PS5 and PC via Steam. Since August 26, its price has permanently dropped to $34.99 across every platform, and that's the price already in effect for anyone buying it on Xbox today. The Nintendo Switch 2 version is set for October 9.

One detail that gives this story a human side: the team behind the game is small, around a dozen people, and spent six years building it. Since the July launch, 18 patches have gone out focused on bug fixes and performance, and the studio says the polishing work isn't done yet.

In practice, anyone who already finished it on PS5 gets nothing new out of this announcement, but for an Xbox owner who held off buying to see if the game would settle down first, the timing is almost perfect: a lower price and two months of fixes already baked in before you even boot it up for the first time. It's the kind of late port that, ironically, shows up in better shape than launch day ever was.