Dark Souls on Switch 2 is a perfect, semi-boosted opportunity to be confused in all the best ways

To quote Hawkeye: Okay… This looks bad.

I mean, this is Dark Souls I’m talking about, so it would be odd if didn’t look bad. But still. Last thing I remember, I was deep underground facing a muddy hill sprouting with thick black hairs. It looked like I had fallen into some horrible giant’s ear canal, and I was approaching the drum. Up ahead – I knew this, because I had already been there once – was a spider-lady who liked to kill me the moment she spotted me. With vomited lava, I think? Behind me lay the rickety gantries and shifting ladders of Blighttown, a place I was eager not to have to explore again in reverse, having barely survived it going in the right direction.

And yet suddenly, what’s this? Here I am at a bonfire I recognise in the Undead Burg? It feels like I’m back near the start of everything. Mossy ersatz Edinburgh waits for me outside, familiar skeleton enemies politely knocking about, and I’m left with all these nagging questions. Where am I in the wider sense, and when am I? Did I decide to skip Darkroot Garden and tackle it later? Have I done that bit where I have to roll off a moving elevator? Am I long past the time I need to be using the Drake Sword? Most of all: why am I up here and not deep down there where I thought I was?

I will be honest. Yes, this does look bad, but I’m actually delighted by all of it. And if you’re in the same position as me, you can be delighted in an identical manner too. What you need is to have started Dark Souls – for the first time, the fifth time, the hundredth time – on Switch quite a while back. Then you need to have put it aside for a bit. Then you need to have bought a Switch 2 and transferred everything across. Then you need to have been bored on a Wednesday afternoon and suddenly thought: Hey, how does Dark Souls run on Switch 2?