The concept of a portable version of Dark Souls should be enough to instantly sell any fan on the idea of Dark Souls Remastered on Switch, and at Gamescom I had a short session with the current build in handheld mode to check it out. My time was spent in the early part of the game from Firelink Shrine to Undead Burg, and I’m happy to report that the game ran at a smooth stable framerate.

Of course, what you won’t be getting in the Switch version compared to the PS4/Xbox One versions of Dark Souls Remastered are those impressive upscaled graphics, and Dark Souls does indeed look rougher on the Switch. While I encountered no framerate drops (although I didn’t really have time to really test it out and head over to Blighttown), there were plenty of low-resolution textures in the environment and jagged edges along the sides of buildings.

However, the game is perfectly playable and responsive in handheld mode, as despite taking over a Deprived character from the previous Gamescom go-er, I was easily able to get through most of Undead Burg, pulling off parries and ripostes and completely forgetting about a couple of the firebomb-using enemies that I really should have memorised by now.

There’s not much else to say at this stage until we can spend more time with the final build on Switch when the game is released on 19 October this year, but for now it looks like a pretty handy translation of Dark Souls for handheld play, with a few sacrifices in visual quality for pretty great stability.