The Best Metroidvanias, Ranked
The metroidvania is the rare genre named after its own two greatest achievements, which sets an awkward bar for everyone since. It's also one of the shapes indie developers return to most often. The loop of exploration, ability-gated progress and mounting mastery fits small teams and big ambitions equally well. This ranking covers the genre's essentials, judged on three things: how well the world rewards exploration, how good the moment-to-moment movement and combat feel, and whether the game earns its length.
10. Guacamelee! 2
The genre's best pure comedy, and sneakily one of its best combat systems. Drinkbox's luchador brawler chains wrestling throws into platforming challenges that would feel at home in Celeste, and its dimension-swapping mechanic keeps the second half inventive. It loses points only for a world map that serves the jokes more than the exploration.
9. Metroid Dread
Samus's long-awaited 2D return is the genre at its most polished: controls so responsive they feel psychic, and the E.M.M.I. stalker sections add real menace. Nintendo's official page for the 2021 Switch release sells the whole thing on "hunt or be hunted", which is about right. It ranks lower than its craft deserves because it's also the most linear game on this list. Dread guides you firmly, and the joy of being lost is mostly absent.
8. Blasphemous 2
Spanish folk-Catholic horror rendered in some of the most striking pixel art in the genre, a subject we get into properly in our pixel art feature. The sequel fixes the original's stiff movement, adds weapon-based traversal gating, and keeps the unforgettable art direction. Its lore is impenetrable in the best way.
7. Ori and the Will of the Wisps
The most beautiful game on this list and the best pure movement this side of Celeste. Will of the Wisps turns traversal itself into the reward, and by the endgame you're flowing through the map like water. Combat took a huge step up from the first game. It sits mid-list only because its exploration is gentler and its challenge lighter than the games above it.
6. Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
The best of the GBA Castlevanias and the purest distillation of the "vania" half of the genre. The Tactical Soul system, in which nearly every enemy can drop an ability, remains the genre's most addictive collect-a-thon, and its twist ending recontextualizes the whole series. It is also the most portable game on this list, which is a decent excuse to keep a Game Boy Advance in a drawer; our console collecting guide makes the case for the hardware.
5. Nine Sols
One of the newest games here, and the genre's best combat, full stop. Red Candle Games' 2024 release borrows Sekiro's deflection-based fighting and translates it into 2D with shocking elegance. Every boss is a rhythm you learn until it becomes a duet. Wrapped around that is a taopunk world with real narrative ambition and an ending that lingers. Only its relatively modest exploration keeps it out of the top three.
4. Hollow Knight: Silksong
Sacrilege to some that it isn't higher; sacrilege to others that it beats Dread and Ori. Team Cherry's September 2025 sequel is bigger, faster and more mechanically generous than its predecessor, and the ruined kingdom of Pharloom is a magnificent setting. What costs it: a brutal early-game difficulty spike that split reviewers down the middle, and pacing that occasionally mistakes friction for depth. Still a monumental game.
3. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
The 1997 game that gave the genre half its name and most of its vocabulary. The inverted castle remains gaming's greatest "wait, what?" moment, Alucard is still the genre's most stylish protagonist, and the RPG systems gave the formula its addictive backbone. Some jank has fossilized around the edges. The confidence of this game, nearly thirty years on, is untouched.
2. Hollow Knight
Team Cherry's debut is the modern genre standard for a reason: Hallownest is the best-realized world the genre has produced, a place with geography, history and mood that unfolds across dozens of hours without a single wasted room. The combat is simple but exact, the atmosphere unmatched. That it grew out of a 2014 Kickstarter that raised a little over A$57,000 from 2,158 backers is still hard to believe.
1. Super Metroid
Thirty-plus years old and still the blueprint. The 1994 SNES original, credited alongside Symphony of the Night with founding the genre, invented or perfected nearly everything this list is built on: wordless environmental storytelling, ability-gated map design that respects the player's memory, an open enough structure that speedrunners have been mining it for sequence breaks ever since, and an atmosphere of isolation no sequel has topped. Modern games are more generous and more polished. None are more whole. If you somehow haven't played it, it's the single best argument for exploring the SNES library. Hardly a hidden gem itself, but the gateway to them.
The snubs
Axiom Verge, Environmental Station Alpha, Rain World (a metroidvania the way a wolf is a dog), Animal Well, which we count as a puzzle game first and which made our 2026 indie list instead, and the Ori original all had cases. That the bench is this deep says everything about the genre's health.