10 Best Metroidvania Games on PlayStation Plus (November 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

Slash through enemies as a futuristic ninja with a plasma sword

Strider Hiryu has been a Capcom icon since the late 1980s, when he made his arcade debut swinging his Cypher, a plasma-powered sword with a tonfa-like hilt that leaves glowing trails with every slash. You might recognize him from the Marvel vs. Capcom fighting games, where he’s been a fan-favorite pick for years. The character originated from a three-part collaboration between Capcom and the manga collective Moto Kikaku, which produced a manga, the arcade game, and a separate NES game. And here’s an interesting bit of trivia: the NES version of Strider was already built around Metroidvania-like exploration in 1989, long before that term became common.

So when the modern Strider game brought the series back with a proper Metroidvania format, it was kind of going back to its roots, in a roundabout way. In this version, you play as Hiryu, an elite assassin sent into a city controlled by a dictator. You can climb walls, cling to ceilings, and move at a ridiculous speed, which makes exploring the interconnected map feel incredibly fluid. Plus, the game operates at 60 frames per second on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, so the action is buttery smooth even during chaotic boss encounters. The bosses, by the way, are a highlight, with large fights built around attack patterns that challenge your mastery of Hiryu’s expanding toolkit.

9. Salt and Sacrifice

Hunt elemental mages and craft gear from their remains

Salt and Sacrifice is the sequel to Salt and Sanctuary, widely considered one of the first games to successfully mash together the 2D Metroidvania formula with Dark Souls-inspired combat. So if you’re familiar with games like Dark Souls or Elden Ring, you know the vibe: difficult enemies, punishing deaths, and that satisfying loop of learning boss patterns through repeated failure. Salt and Sacrifice carries that DNA forward, and then layers on something new: Mage Hunts, borrowed heavily from the Monster Hunter franchise.

Here’s how Mage Hunts work. You enter a region, trigger a hunt, and then chase down an elemental mage across the map. These bosses teleport between areas, spawning their own minions along the way, and you have to track them through multiple zones before you corner them for the final fight. Once you defeat a mage, you consume its heart and collect crafting materials from its body, bones and all. Those materials then go toward building weapons and armor tied to that specific element. It can be frustrating, I won’t sugarcoat that. But the addictive cycle of hunting, crafting, and upgrading is exactly why it’s on this PS Plus Metroidvania games list.

8. Celeste

Climb a mountain with jump, dash, and wall-grab abilities

Celeste is a precision platformer centered on Madeline, a young woman dealing with anxiety and depression, who decides to climb the treacherous Celeste Mountain as a personal challenge. Now, I know, “platformer tackling mental health” could sound heavy or preachy, and I get the hesitation. However, the genius here is how the story ties directly into the gameplay, because the mountain itself becomes a metaphor for the internal struggle, with the difficulty of each chapter reflecting Madeline’s emotional state at that point.

Your moveset is deliberately limited: jump, wall-climb, and a single mid-air dash. You can dash in any of eight directions, and you only get one per air cycle until you land on solid ground or touch a green crystal that recharges it. With just these tools, the game builds hundreds of handcrafted rooms that ask you to thread precise paths through spikes, moving platforms, and all sorts of hazards. You will die a lot in Celeste, probably hundreds of times per chapter, and the game knows this. Respawns are instant, no loading screens, no punishment, just right back at the start of the room.

7. Child of Light

Turn-based fairy tale RPG with side-scrolling exploration

Child of Light stars Aurora, the young daughter of an Austrian duke, who falls into a deep sleep and wakes up in a magical world called Lemuria. Now, what immediately stands out here is the visual style, because the game is built on the same engine as Rayman Legends (the UbiArt Framework), and it looks like a watercolor painting brought to life. Colors blend and shift in the backgrounds, and characters move through the world as if they’re floating through the pages of an illustrated storybook. It’s worth mentioning, too, that the game’s dialogue is entirely written in rhyming verse, every conversation, every narration, even the quest descriptions.

Overall, it’s charming, and occasionally a little forced with the meter, but it adds a fairy tale quality that pairs well with the visuals. Then, combat works on a turn-based timeline, similar to classic Final Fantasy titles. You and your enemies share a progress bar at the bottom of the screen, and timing matters because you can interrupt an enemy’s attack if you hit them while they’re in the casting phase, sending them back to the beginning of the bar. On that note, Igniculus, your companion firefly, becomes essential. You control Igniculus separately with the right analog stick, and you can slow down enemies by hovering his light over them, heal your party members during combat, or use him outside of battle to reach hidden chests and solve light-based puzzles.

6. Rain World

Survive as a tiny creature in a hostile ecosystem driven by AI

Rain World casts you as a slugcat, which is exactly what it sounds like, a small creature that’s part slug, part cat, soft and vulnerable and sitting right in the middle of the food chain. You’ve been separated from your family during a catastrophic flood, and the whole point is to find them again. The problem is that everything in this world is trying to eat you. Lizards, vultures, giant predatory plants, and all sorts of alien-looking creatures roam the 1600+ rooms of Rain World’s map, and they don’t care about you specifically, they care about their own survival. And this is where Rain World does something truly different from every other game on this list.

The creatures in Rain World run on independent AI, so they have their own behavioral patterns, their own hunger, their own predators. They wander the world freely even when you’re nowhere near them, hunting each other, fleeing from bigger threats, and establishing territories. So no two play sessions feel the same because the wildlife is always doing its own thing. You might sneak through a corridor safely on your first try, and the next time a pack of lizards has claimed it as hunting ground. Your primary tools are spears, which you can throw at smaller creatures for food or at predators to ward them off, and you need to eat enough before each cycle to hibernate in a safe den. If you don’t hibernate before the rain arrives, massive deadly downpours flood the entire world and kill anything caught outside.

5. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

Persian warrior slashes through time-bending puzzles in a massive 2D world

Prince of Persia goes all the way back to 1989, and most people associate the name with the 3D Sands of Time trilogy from the mid-2000s. You know, the acrobatic prince rewinding time in big cinematic action sequences. The Lost Crown goes back to the franchise’s 2D roots, and it does so with a Metroidvania structure that clicks incredibly well. You play as Sargon, a warrior from an elite group called the Immortals, who gets sent into a mythical mountain frozen in time to rescue the kidnapped prince. So you’re saving the Prince of Persia, rather than playing as him, something that already changes things up.

Sargon is ridiculously fast, and chaining together dashes, wall jumps, and time-based abilities to clear platforming sections is addictive. Plus, the map is massive for a game in this genre, packed with branching paths and shortcuts that reveal themselves the deeper you go. This game features “Memory Shards,” letting you take a screenshot of a locked door or unreachable area and pin it to your map. So when you eventually unlock the right ability, you know exactly where to go back. I wish more Metroidvanias would steal this idea. Combat is built around pattern-based boss encounters paired with parry mechanics, and the boss variety here is impressive across the board, every fight demanding a different approach.

4. Dandara: Trials of Fear Edition

Leap between walls, floors, and ceilings in a gravity-bending adventure

Dandara: Trials of Fear Edition is named after Dandara dos Palmares, an Afro-Brazilian warrior from the 1600s who fought against slavery in colonial Brazil. Here, you play as Dandara, a heroine born from the void of creation, and the entire mission revolves around freeing a crumbling world called Salt from oppression. Now here’s the thing that separates Dandara from every other side-scrolling Metroidvania you’ve played: there is no walking. Dandara can only leap between surfaces covered in salt, whether that’s a floor, a ceiling, or a wall sideways, and gravity has zero pull on her. So you’re constantly launching yourself across rooms in quick, directional jumps, rotating your orientation with each landing.

This movement is the core of everything here, and it changes how you approach combat, too. You’ll aim a charged shot while leaping between surfaces, timing your attacks while repositioning across walls and platforms that enemies also crawl on. It’s frantic and satisfying once the flow clicks, yet admittedly jarring at first because your brain wants to default to regular movement. Combat encounters become spatial puzzles, in a way, since you’re always thinking vertically as much as horizontally. You collect salt from defeated enemies, and spending it at designated locations upgrades Dandara’s health and abilities. Dying results in dropping your accumulated salt, and you get a chance to recover it by returning to where you fell, almost exactly like how it works in Hollow Knight.

3. Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom

Switch between animal forms to solve puzzles and explore the kingdom

If you grew up playing Sega consoles in the late ’80s and ’90s, the name Wonder Boy probably rings a bell. Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is an official spiritual successor to that classic franchise, and the original creator Ryuichi Nishizawa worked directly on the project. You play as Jin, a blue-haired kid whose uncle has gone on a magical rampage across the kingdom, cursing every citizen by turning them into animals. And sure enough, Jin himself gets caught in the spell too, which transforms him into a pig in the opening stretch.

As you defeat bosses, you unlock five additional animal transformations, and this is the central hook of the game. Pig, frog, snake, lion, and dragon, with each form completely changing how you interact with the world around you. The frog can swim and use its tongue to reach distant objects, the snake can slither through tight gaps, the lion can charge through breakable walls, and the dragon can fly and shoot fireballs. Later puzzles require you to rapidly switch between two or three forms mid-jump, combining abilities in ways that are tricky and incredibly rewarding once you figure them out. I love that the hand-drawn animations are so detailed, too, because each form has unique idle animations, facial expressions, and movement styles, almost like watching a high-budget cartoon.

2. Dead Cells

One of the most popular Metroidvania games on PlayStation Plus

Dead Cells blends two genres that, on paper, seem contradictory. Metroidvania games are typically about memorizing interconnected maps, learning layouts, and methodically unlocking shortcuts over time. Roguelikes, on the other hand, scramble everything when you die, resetting your weapons, your upgrades, and your map layout. Dead Cells somehow fuses both ideas into a hybrid the developers themselves called a “roguevania,” and it clicks surprisingly well. You control the Prisoner, and when you die, and you will die a lot, you lose almost everything, your weapons, your abilities, your gold, your current path through the game.

However, the sting of dying has a softener built into the design. Enemies drop a currency called Cells, and if you can spend those Cells at checkpoints before dying, you permanently unlock new weapons, abilities, and mutations for future attempts. So each run, even a bad one, can contribute something lasting to your overall pool of options. The weapon selection is absurd, with swords, bows, whips, traps, grenades, and dozens of combinable loadouts that keep each run feeling fresh. Plus, the combat itself is razor-sharp. There’s a speed and fluidity to how your character moves, rolls, and chains attacks together that I’d compare more to a fighting game than a traditional platformer.

1. Hollow Knight

Explore a vast underground insect kingdom with tight sword combat

Hollow Knight is about a tiny, mysterious warrior known as the Knight, a Vessel connected to the Void, who descends into Hallownest, a massive underground kingdom inhabited by bugs and other creatures. And when I say massive, I mean it, because this world is enormous. Hallownest was once a thriving civilization ruled by a being called the Pale King, who expanded the minds of several bug species, granting them intelligence. Over time, however, a mysterious supernatural Infection spread through the kingdom, turning many of its inhabitants into hostile husks, and everything collapsed. By the time you arrive, Hallownest is a ruin filled with aggressive creatures, forgotten lore, and abandoned structures that whisper at a much grander history.

The game barely tells you any of this directly, by the way. You piece it together through scattered tablet inscriptions, conversations with the few remaining sane characters, and environmental clues. And exploring it is an absolute commitment, because Hallownest is massive. I’m talking well over forty hours of content if you’re thorough. Your primary weapon is the Nail, essentially a tiny sword, and the combat revolves around spacing, timing, and managing a resource called Soul. You collect Soul by hitting enemies, and you can spend it either on healing yourself or on casting offensive spells, which creates a constant push-and-pull during tougher encounters.

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.