The longer we live with Switch 2, the more we discover about how developers intend to port across their PlayStation 5/Xbox Series X titles over to the new Nintendo hybrid - and the reveal of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle tells us much about how a cutting-edge engine scales back to accommodate the more power-limited T239 processor. Some of the cuts are obvious, others less so, but the good news is that Switch 2 appears much better equipped to carry off these ports than its predecessor did at the same point in its lifecycle.

Looking at Indiana Jones specifically, the first point to focus on is how much of the original presentation holds up, based on the footage seen in the recent Nintendo Direct. The game's materials, lighting and environmental detail don't seem obviously degraded compared to, say, the last-gen Switch's idTech ports. That we're seeing this mere months into the release of the Nintendo machine is promising. This is just the beginning.

Realistically though, there are cuts, of course. Compared to PS5 and Series X, screen-space reflections on water are gone for example - and it makes sense. SSR is expensive, but its absence is far less impactful than slashing shadow quality too aggressively or removing volumetric effects. Its omission is even less painful bearing in mind that the effect on Xbox and PlayStation consoles wasn't the best implementation we've seen anyway.

Key to this port will be its handling of global illumination. Indiana Jones is a game reliant on hardware-accelerated RT hardware to get the job done - and it's fundamental to the game's look, delivering a coherent solution for convincing indirect lighting. That GI is still in place, retaining the game's natural bounce lighting, as opposed to the stark, flat appearance seen when that effect is removed. Is the Switch 2 game using RT? We need to see more but the likely reality is a tuned version of the system seen in the current-gen consoles.

The performance side of things sees the most obvious - and inevitable - compromise. The original 60fps is pared back to 30fps, effectively doubling the frame-time available to the developers. Unlike, say, Doom: The Dark Ages, Indiana Jones' core gameplay doesn't benefit immensely from running at 60fps. It's an adventure rich in exploration and stealth. 30fps is absolutely fine here for the task in hand, with high quality motion blur used to smooth off the presentation.

A lot of questions remain. Large, open, NPC-dense areas like the Giza market or the Vatican square were relatively demanding based on how the PC version operated - and we're looking forward to seeing how those hold up on Switch 2. And more generally, with a title that possesses so much environmental density, it'll be interesting to see how consistent the 30fps target actually is across the game. Meanwhile, image quality appears to be managed via a competent reconstruction solution - we need to see more before we start talking about internal and upscaled resolution metrics and the potential use of DLSS.

Taken as a whole, first impressions suggest that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on Switch 2 may represent a great example of how to bring a cutting-edge current‑gen title to lower-power hardware: keep the core feature set, cut selectively where it hurts least, lean on reconstruction and motion blur to handle pixel and frame-rate drops, accepting that 30fps may be necessary in Switch 2 ports up against their PS5 counterparts. This debut showing suggests that Indiana Jones has been expertly adapted to Switch 2. It's unlikely to be a carbon copy of the PS5 and Series X originals, but based on what we've seen so far, its core identity remains intact.