// PC GAMER — GAMING
This 1986 Japanese adventure game showing up on Steam in 2026 guarantees it makes my GOTY list—you've really got to play it
Relics doesn't belong in a museum: it belongs on your PC.
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Pasokon Retro is our regular look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, encompassing everything from specialist '80s computers to the happy days of Windows XP.
The contrasting blue/yellow tones often make it look like an optician's colour blindness test, the frame rate is what I would generously describe as "present", and the hardware it was designed for is now old enough to have a mid-life crisis. In spite of these admittedly tough-to-love qualities, the unexpected appearance of the thoroughly ancient action-adventure Relics on Steam today is definitely one of my PC gaming highlights of the year.
A lot of games are very good at showing me a strange land, but few are as capable of convincing me I’m actually standing in one as this one does. The slim manual spends more time talking about how mysterious everything is than it does saying anything useful. There's the briefest bit of vague introductory fluff about the cosmic struggle between two forces, and after a quick skim I start the game and appear as a humanoid shadow floating within… I honestly have no idea.
A crumbling wall to the left reveals the shining sunset behind as an effective approximation of waves crashing against rocks plays over my speakers. There's a hole in the floor. Everything I can see is all I know.
With all guidance deliberately withheld, I have no choice but to stumble about and see what happens, "spirit riding" from body to body as I go. I am a skeletal rabbit inspired by H.R. Giger. I am an armoured soldier with a gun. I am a sorcerer clad in gold. I am perpetually bewildered but never annoyed, because I can see there's a consistent if alien sort of logic at work here, a bigger story I'm glimpsing a tiny part of, told in fragmented notes guarded by potentially deadly statues and by powerful beings who disappear without warning or explanation.
Happily, most of these messages are in English (and have been since Relic's first release in the '80s), and the few that aren't are written in an English cypher I must puzzle out using an in-game key and good old-fashioned pen and paper.
Shifting from body to body doesn't just grant me new attacks or tougher forms but also offers a little abstracted insight into how everything I see interconnects, allies and enemies determined by an ambitious tangle of relationships and behaviours. So that nightmare bunny I started out as is viewed as an annoying pest by the soldiers, something to be eradicated if it doesn't "GO AWAY" when yelled at. Soldiers stop to greet each other with a relatively friendly "NO TROUBLE", as equals stuck in the same weird boat. If I possess one of their superiors a "SIR" will appear at the end of that greeting, as a sign of respect… or perhaps fear, after experiencing officers attacking soldiers who refuse to return to their positions when gruffly requested first hand.
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