10 Best Metroidvania Games on PlayStation Plus (September 2026)

Looking for the best Metroidvania games on PlayStation Plus? Metroidvania games bring a perfect mix of action, platforming, and deep exploration. They let you unlock new powers, backtrack through hidden paths, and discover new areas as you grow stronger. With so many great options on PS Plus, it’s the right time to dive into this exciting genre. Here’s a list of ten fun and standout Metroidvania games you can play right now.

What Defines the Best Metroidvania Game?

A good Metroidvania game should give a sense of discovery through a connected world where paths link back to each other. Combat needs to be engaging, with enemies and bosses that test skill without becoming unfair. Progression works best when new abilities or tools open fresh areas, encouraging you to revisit earlier zones with a new purpose. Visual style and music play a big part too, which sets the right mood for long sessions. Considering all these things, we have put together this list of the best Metroidvania games that you can enjoy on PS Plus.

List of 10 Best PlayStation Plus Metroidvania Games in 2026

Each game on this list brings exciting combat, smart upgrades, and maps designed for deep exploration.

10. Strider

Slice through everything at ridiculous speed as a futuristic ninja

Strider originally blew up as an arcade classic back in the late ’80s, and this reboot carries that same energy forward but wraps it in an open, interconnected map you can explore freely. You play as Hiryu, a ninja with a plasma blade, and from start to finish the focus is on moving fast and cutting through anything in your path. Robots, soldiers, giant mechanical creatures, it doesn’t matter. Hiryu starts out powerful and just gets stronger from there, which already goes against how most games in this genre work. Usually you begin weak and slowly build up. Here, you’re already a threat from the first swing.

However, what you lack early on is access, because certain paths stay locked until you pick up new traversal abilities that double as combat upgrades. So the exploration is there, but it doesn’t slow you down the way you’d expect. In fact, the developers shaped every layer of the game to strike a balance between speed and discovery, since Hiryu moves roughly eight times faster than the original arcade version. You’re climbing walls, flipping off ceilings, and dashing through rooms without breaking stride. Sure, the map design doesn’t have the depth of something like Hollow Knight. Yet for a fast, aggressive side-scroller with metroidvania DNA running through it, Strider gets the job done well.

9. Salt and Sacrifice

Hunt corrupted mages across punishing 2D landscapes

Salt and Sacrifice blends two very specific influences into a single package. On one side, you have the 2D metroidvania exploration with grappling hooks, wall jumps, and interconnected maps. On the other, you have measured, stamina-based combat modeled after the Souls formula, where every attack, dodge, and block drains stamina, and getting greedy with your swings can get you killed by even the most basic enemy. You play as an Inquisitor, a condemned criminal given one shot at redemption by hunting down rogue mages across multiple grim landscapes.

The gameplay centers on tracking these mages, fighting through their minions, and then battling the mage itself in a multi-phase encounter. And Salt and Sacrifice goes deep with the mage hunting mechanic, plus each mage fight is like its own mini event because these bosses roam the map, spawning creatures and disrupting the environment as they move. You’ll have to chase them across the terrain before the final showdown even begins. But certain areas spike hard in difficulty, and the pacing doesn’t always feel balanced. Still, if you enjoy methodical combat with that 2D exploration blend, this belongs on your radar among PlayStation Plus Metroidvania games in 2026.

8. Celeste

Climb a mountain, face your inner demons through precision platforming

Celeste is, to be precise, a precision platformer and not a traditional metroidvania. So why is it on this list? Because the way it structures its chapters, the gated abilities, and the hidden collectibles scattered across every screen share a lot of similarities with metroidvania design. And I think metroidvania fans will feel right at home here. You play as Madeline, a young woman who decides to climb a mountain to prove something to herself. In this game, the story and the difficulty are tied together in a way you rarely see anywhere else.

Your moveset stays small the entire time: you can jump, grab walls briefly, and air-dash once. However, each chapter introduces environmental twists that completely change how those three inputs work together. Wind pushes you sideways mid-jump. Floating crystals reset your dash. Moving blocks carry you through spike-filled corridors. You’ll die hundreds of times per chapter, but respawns are instant, so the cycle of try-die-retry is closer to solving a puzzle than hitting a wall.

7. Child of Light

Fly through a watercolor fairy tale with turn-based RPG battles

I’d compare Child of Light to a bedtime story you can play. Aurora, the main character, wakes up in a dreamy painted world after she gets separated from her father, and her goal is to bring back the light that’s been stolen from the sky. However, what caught me off guard early on is that every single line of dialogue in this game rhymes. Every conversation, every narrator bit, every side character interaction is written in verse like a children’s storybook. And it lands better than you’d expect because the visual style matches it perfectly, with these soft watercolor backgrounds that look hand-brushed onto canvas. So the whole mood holds together throughout.

Aurora also gains the ability to fly pretty early, and once that happens, you’re freely floating through these layered environments, finding hidden chests and tucking into corners of the map you’d otherwise miss. Battles switch to a separate screen with turn-based combat, and the timing element here is crucial. You see a bar at the bottom showing when you and your enemies will act, and if you hit an enemy while they’re mid-action, their move gets cancelled. So the whole fight revolves around managing who acts when, and your firefly companion can slow down enemies or heal your party in between turns.

6. Rain World

Survive as a tiny creature near the bottom of an evolving food chain

I’d say Rain World is probably the most unconventional pick on this list. So let me set the stage. You’re a slugcat, which is exactly what it sounds like, a squishy little animal that’s part slug, part cat, and you’ve been separated from your family. Your job is to find them. But the world you’re moving through doesn’t care about your quest at all. Every creature around you is busy trying to eat, avoid being eaten, or find shelter before deadly rain wipes out everything above ground. And you’re very, very low on the food chain. Lizards will hunt you across multiple screens. Vultures will dive from above. Spiders will corner you in tight spaces.

However, those same predators also fight each other, so sometimes your biggest threat gets dragged away by something even larger. Plus, the creatures in Rain World aren’t scripted. They all run on individual behavioral logic, with their own personality traits and survival instincts, so they’re constantly making decisions independent of you. Movement is sluggish and heavy by design because, well, you’re a tiny vulnerable creature. Your weapons are limited to spears and rocks you scavenge from the environment. Before each rain cycle hits, you have to eat enough food and reach a safe shelter to hibernate, or you lose everything.

5. The Rogue Prince of Persia

Parkour-fueled runs through procedurally shifting stages with swords and kicks

Prince of Persia as a franchise has been around for decades, with its signature acrobatic movement and trap-filled environments becoming a staple of action platforming. The series has gone through multiple reinventions, from the original 1989 side-scroller all the way to the more recent 3D entries and the metroidvania-style Lost Crown. The Rogue Prince of Persia sits somewhere between all of those, blending the wall-running and dagger combat the franchise is known for with a roguelite loop where dying sends you back to the beginning. Well, it’s closer to a roguevania than a traditional metroidvania, since the map changes with each attempt and there’s permadeath baked in.

But the way you unlock new routes and expand your options over time has that metroidvania flavor running through it. Also, because the stages are procedurally arranged, you’ll run into different weapon and passive ability combos every attempt. The movement here is smooth and responsive, with the Prince able to wall-run vertically, vault over enemies, swing off poles, and kick foes into environmental hazards like spike traps and rotating blades. It’s a strong pick among the best PS Plus Metroidvania games in 2026, especially if you want something with high replayability and a snappy rhythm to it.

4. Dandara: Trials of Fear Edition

Gravity-defying movement where you launch between surfaces to explore and fight

Most 2D side-scrollers let you walk, run, and jump across platforms in a horizontal space. Dandara completely removes traditional movement from the equation. You can’t walk left or right, you can’t jump in the conventional sense, and gravity has zero influence on how you navigate. You move by aiming at specific surfaces, floors, walls, ceilings, and launching yourself toward them. Once you land, you stick there until you aim somewhere else and leap again. This single mechanic reshapes the entire game, from how you explore rooms to how you approach enemies to how you solve environmental puzzles.

The world called Salt is full of branching paths and interconnected areas gated behind abilities you acquire over time. Combat works within this same framework, and you charge up projectile shots while perched on a surface, then aim and fire at enemies who are also zipping around the room. Boss encounters, I’d say, are where the gravity-free movement hits its stride, because bouncing between walls and ceilings while dodging projectiles and lining up your own shots creates a very unique kind of challenge. Among the best Metroidvania games on PlayStation Plus, Dandara is the wildcard entry, because it tears up the rulebook on how these games are supposed to handle movement.

3. Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom

Switch between animal forms mid-jump to solve layered environmental puzzles

Monster Boy carries forward a legacy from the Wonder Boy series, and the big hook here is animal transformations. You play as Jin, who gets cursed into a pig early on, and from there you gradually unlock more animal forms as you collect orbs scattered across the map. So you’ve got a pig that can sniff out hidden passages and cast spells, a snake that squeezes through tight gaps and crawls up walls, a frog that can swing from hooks with his tongue, a lion with a powerful charge, and a dragon that flies and breathes fire. This game expects you to swap between these forms in the middle of a single jump. You might leap as a frog to grab a hook, then instantly shift into a snake to latch onto the wall above it.

In fact, the further you progress through the map, the more creative these sequences get, sometimes chaining three or four transformations in a row to cross a single room. However, the real strength here is how the puzzle design ties everything together. Rooms will have color-coded rings, levers on ceilings, moving platforms, and hazards that require you to think about which form to use and when. Sure, the early sections lean a bit simple while you’re limited to the pig form. Yet once three or four forms are unlocked, the game expands massively, and backtracking to earlier areas with new abilities uncovers things you walked right past the first time.

2. Dead Cells

Randomly generated castle runs with permadeath, dozens of weapons, and fast combat

Dead Cells sits in a weird spot when it comes to genre labels. In a traditional metroidvania, you have a fixed map, you backtrack through it, and you unlock new paths with abilities you earn over time. Dead Cells borrows that last part, the ability-gated exploration, but everything else about it leans heavily into the roguelite side. So the environments shift around between runs, death sends you all the way back to the beginning, and your weapons and upgrades vanish with you. However, the abilities you unlock to access new routes stay with you permanently.

The developers themselves coined the term “RogueVania” for it, which I think is the most honest description you’ll find. The difficulty ramps up across tiered challenge levels, too, so even after you clear the game once, there are harder versions waiting with new enemy types and fewer safety nets. It’s a vicious, addictive loop. As far as the best PS Plus Metroidvania games in 2026 go, Dead Cells is the one you’ll keep coming back to long after you think you’ve seen everything.

1. Hollow Knight

Explore an enormous underground insect kingdom with tight combat and hidden secrets everywhere

Hollow Knight is a traditional metroidvania through and through, and it’s the type that reminds you why this genre exists in the first place. You play as a small, silent knight who descends into an underground kingdom filled with insects, ancient ruins, and forgotten civilizations. And as you push further down, you start realizing how massive this place actually is. There are well over a dozen regions stitched together, all connected organically, which means you’re frequently stumbling into areas you weren’t expecting. However, the game doesn’t hand you directions or waypoints. In fact, you won’t even see where you’ve been until you track down a specific character hiding somewhere in each region.

So exploration feels intentionally unhurried and open-ended at first, and I love that about it. You earn new movement abilities as you go, like a wall climb or a downward dive that breaks through floors, and each one reopens the entire world in ways you didn’t anticipate. Old dead ends suddenly become new routes. Also, healing demands that you stay motionless for a little over a second, which during a boss fight is an eternity. The boss encounters are designed around this exact tradeoff. Lastly, the difficulty ramps up considerably, especially during these boss encounters where you’re forced to learn attack patterns through repetition. I’d call this the definitive entry on any list of best Metroidvania games on PlayStation Plus, and I don’t think that’s a stretch at all.

FAQs

Do I need any experience with metroidvanias to enjoy these games?

You don’t, and a few of these are solid entry points. Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is approachable because it has frequent save points, fast travel, and a forgiving checkpoint structure. Celeste also eases you in with assist options that let you adjust the difficulty to your comfort level. However, games like Hollow Knight and Rain World can be overwhelming if you’ve never played the genre before, so I’d suggest starting with something gentler and working your way up.

Which of these PS Plus metroidvania games are the most difficult?

Rain World is probably the toughest on this list because the ecosystem runs on its own rules, and survival depends on learning them the hard way. Hollow Knight is up there too, especially during late-game boss encounters where attack patterns get relentless. Dead Cells can also be punishing at higher difficulty tiers, but the randomized structure means you can always try a different approach on your next run. If you’re after a more relaxed experience, Child of Light and Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom are much easier to get through.

How long does it take to finish these games?

It varies quite a bit. Strider and Celeste can be completed in around six to eight hours, so they’re great if your schedule is tight. Hollow Knight, on the other hand, can easily eat up forty or more hours if you explore everything. Dead Cells is tricky to pin down because individual runs are short, but the loop of unlocking new routes and gear can keep you occupied for months. Salt and Sacrifice and Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom fall somewhere in the middle at around fifteen to twenty hours each.

Do any of these metroidvania games have multiplayer or co-op?

Child of Light has a light co-op feature where a second player can control a companion character during combat. Salt and Sacrifice supports both local and online co-op, so you can tackle bosses with a friend. However, the majority of this list is built around solo play. Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, Celeste, and Dandara: Trials of Fear Edition are all single-player experiences from start to finish.

If I can only play one game from this list, which should it be?

Hollow Knight, and it’s an easy pick. The amount of content packed into it is staggering for the price, and the quality across combat, exploration, and world design is consistently high. But if you want something with more replayability and shorter sessions, Dead Cells is the better fit. And if you’ve never touched a metroidvania before, Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is the smoothest introduction on this list.