It’s hard for me to state just how excited I was for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. The sprawling, explorative Castlevania games are some of my favourites, and the idea of a new game from Koji Igarashi tickled me. And then the game came out, and by all reports, it was pretty damned good! I grabbed the Switch version, because it seems a perfect platform this sort of game – and was slapped in the face with one of the most disappointing ports I’ve played. On the Switch, Bloodstained not only looks bad, it plays worse – with constant frame rate drops, weird input latency and frequent crashes.

Much like the games that influenced it, the latest Bloodstained game also has plenty of secrets up its sleeves. Hidden rooms, mystical mysteries and powerful bosses who hide items of great power within the walls of your current locale. Some are obvious, whereas others require you to do a little bit of digging to get to the good stuff. Here’s how you can lay your hands on the keys needed to open these locked rooms, if you’re brave enough to take down the monsters waiting inside that is.

For years now, we’ve been hearing about the “death” of single player games. It seems they're alive and well, and will continue to be.

There’s a great big resurgence of Metroidvania games at the moment, with numerous titles that use the general concept or ideas around the concept.One of the most anticipated ones is now delayed.

Sure the whole experience may be a little derivative, but when you’re copying from yourself, is it really plagiarism? Either way, Bloodstained is likely to delight fans who can get past the relative lack of gothic icons like Dracula and Alucard. I will say that the 20 or so minutes I had to demo the game absolutely flew by, leaving me sad - and definitely wanting to play more.

Unsurprising to anyone but Konami, players are clamouring to get a new taste of Castlevanie-esque goodness with BloodstainedL Curse of the Moon. And many are heading to Switch to give it a go.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was everything that a Castlevania fan could ever want. Now, Igarashi’s new franchise is making a retro return this month in the form of Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon. Somebody pass me my VHS tapes of M-Net open-time recordings of Buffy The Vampire Slayer while I boot this trailer up.

Koji Igarashi's spiritual successor to Symphony onf the Night is heading to Nintendo's new console. But that does mean the Wii U version is now no more.