This is not a remake, rather a collection of all the three Castlevania titles that were published only on the Nintendo DS at the time, for the PC and other platforms. So you get:

• Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow
• Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin
• Castlevania Order of Ecclesia

Nice! If you had a DS before you have probably come across at least a few of them.

They add on top of that the original Castlevania title (8 bit, ugly as hell, and not very fun to play) and the Castlevania arcade game (made for the arcades, so very linear and rather unsurprising).

The arcade game has an impressive final boss fight, but I could not even beat it with unlimited continues.

This is a bundle for about 20 dollars. It may sound a little pricey, but at the same time, you do get all of the DS titles in one pack, and all of them are great titles in the Metroidvania genre. I did Dawn of the Sorrow on the DS a long time ago and it was a very enjoyable title. The only drawback is that you don’t get any graphical upgrade.

This IS the Nintendo DS version of those games, love it or hate it. The screen is split in three parts, to make everything visible at once.

This bundle is obviously running some kind of emulator, but it does have quite a few tricks up its sleeves: a proper menu, soundtracks for each of the games, and proper controls to make up for the lack of touch screen (using the joypads, or mouse when you are on desktop). On the Steam Deck you can actually use the touch screen, but since it’s nothing like the screen of the Nintendo DS, it’s not that practical to use. The main menu lets you also change the screen split settings using several different layouts, and you can switch between American, European, Japanese and Korean versions of the game. Which is great, since most of us only had access to a single version when the DS version was out.

On the Steam Deck everything runs flawlessly at 4W (almost the lowest setting) at steady 60 FPS, which means you will be able to play easily 3 or 4 hours on a single battery charge.

It’s a good bundle. You will get at least 50 hours out of this bundle across the three main games. It’s cheaper than most other remakes - Ghost Trick from the DS era is twice that price on Steam (while it’s a proper remake, yes, but fundamentally still the same game). It’s more polished that some of the lower effort bundles from other companies (wink wink Capcom).

Now, the real question is… do you want to play these Castlevania games when there’s hundreds of Metroidvanias out there these days? You may prefer Hollow Knight after all… Still, Castlevania is special. The world, the enemies, the game system is just very familiar and runs like a good engine, it’s been proven and tested across multiple games and it’s a solid formula that hardly disappoints. But if I were to play another older title, I’d go for SOTN, Symphony of the Night, the original real Metroidvania title in the series, and still the best in the genre in my humble opinion.

Of course, there’s always Bloodstained if you want something more recent with 3D graphics, but I prefer 2D graphics by far. 3D feels off for Castlevania-themed games.

So there you go. It’s on Steam right now here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2369900/Castlevania_Dominus_Collection/

We were provided a key by the publisher. Opinions are our own.