Konami's Castlevania Dominus Collection bundles up three DS hits and one arcade remaster for £20 or $25

Here’s one we missed from this week’s release round-up, possibly because Konami appear to have given it precisely zero promotion: the Castlevania Dominus Collection, a four-game bundle spanning PC ports of three well-regarded DS Castlevanias, plus a redesigned version of Castlevania Haunted Castle, the first Castlevania game to grace an arcade machine. It’ll set you back $25, £20 or €25, and my drive-by analysis of the trailer below is that they've done a decent job with the ports.

The DS games in question are Castlevania: Dawn Of Sorrow, in which you can combine souls to make weapons, Castlevania: Portrait Of Ruin, which sees you switching between two protagonists with different abilities, and Castlevania Order of Ecclesia, in which you scour Dracula’s Castle for magic glyphs. All have naturally been reorganised to fit on a single screen, with inventory and map stuff over on the right. In the case of fiddlier DS-specific flourishes, like Dawn Of Sorrow’s drawing mechanic, they’ve come up with some… straightforward solutions. The port of Haunted Castle, meanwhile, includes both a redesigned version with more elaborate pixelart and a straight port of the original.

Oh hang on, I get why we missed this from the round-up. They shadow-dropped it during one of those Nintendo Direct things the Silksong people keep shrieking about, which also brought news that Konami’s Suikoden 1 and 2 HD remasters will arrive in March. Konami are doing a brisk trade in revivals of various kinds at the minute, with a new version of Silent Hill 2 and a new-ish version of Metal Gear Solid 3 on the cards.

My thoughts inevitably turn to the future of the Castlevania series. Our buddies the Belmonts and old man Dracula have found another lease of life/undeath on Netflix, but it’s been a while since the last actual new Castlevania game, the underwhelming Lords Of Shadow 2. Konami appear content right now to loan their various vampires and vampire-killers out to games like V Rising. I’d really love to play a Sonic Mania-style reboot of the 2D series. In the meantime, you can check out the Dominus Collection on Steam.