10 Best Metroidvania Games on Steam (October 2026)

Looking for the best Metroidvania Steam games in 2026? Steam has a huge collection of games, and Metroidvania titles bring some of the most fun experiences out there. These games mix action, exploration, and puzzle-solving in a way that keeps you playing for hours. With so many great choices, we’ve picked out a list of the ten best Metroidvania games you can enjoy right now. Each one offers something special, and all of them are packed with exciting moments and smart gameplay.

What Defines the Best Metroidvania Games?

When picking the best Metroidvania games, I care about a few simple things. Exploration has to feel natural. I want to get lost, but in a good way. The game should make me want to look around, not just rush forward. Movement matters too. If it feels boring to jump or climb, I lose interest fast. Combat should be responsive and fun, even if it’s simple. I also look at how upgrades affect the game. The best ones change how you move or fight in ways that feel worth it.

List of 10 Best Steam Metroidvania Games in 2026

These games have the right mix of smart combat, fun movement, and exploration that keeps you hooked.

10. Rain World

Survive a brutal ecosystem where you’re both predator and prey

Rain World is a survival platformer with metroidvania-style exploration, and the world operates around you, with or without you. You play as a slugcat, this small, vulnerable, cat-like creature caught somewhere in the middle of a food chain. Bigger predators are hunting you. Some smaller creatures are your food. And massive rainstorms flood the landscape at regular intervals, so you constantly need to find shelter and hibernate before the water washes everything away. The base game spans over 1,600 rooms across 12 different regions, all connected and populated by AI-driven creatures with their own behaviors and hunting patterns.

So, you’re learning how to move the slugcat through pipes, across ledges, through tight tunnels, all while reading the behavior of creatures around you. The slugcat’s movement uses procedural animation, so its body has this organic, weighted quality to it as you climb and slide and squeeze through gaps. It can be brutal, especially in the first couple of hours when you’re still figuring out the rhythm of the rain cycles. But once it clicks, you’ll be zipping through rooms with a speed and confidence that seems incredibly earned. And for a game with metroidvania-style exploration driven by genuine danger and curiosity rather than checkmarks on a map, this deserves its spot among the best Metroidvania Steam games.

9. Carrion

Play as the monster and consume your way out of captivity

Carrion is, well, the complete opposite of how you’d expect a metroidvania to work. In most games in this genre, you play as some hero or small character navigating hostile territory. Carrion flips that entire premise, and you control a shapeless, tentacled mass of flesh and teeth. The creature has been held captive in a research facility, and your goal is to escape by consuming humans, smashing through containment barriers, and spreading your biomass across the complex. The whole thing is described as a “reverse horror” experience, and it earns that label in full. Scientists, soldiers, and security measures are all in your way, and you tear through them like something out of an 80s sci-fi movie.

Speaking of the actual gameplay, Carrion’s movement is surprisingly smooth for a creature with no defined shape. You can extend tentacles to grab people, squeeze through vents, and grow larger as you consume more organic material, while new abilities you acquire throughout the facility change what each form can do. Smaller forms let you turn invisible and sneak past certain threats, while bigger forms give you raw destructive power. And the metroidvania structure here is solid. Several areas gate off behind abilities you acquire later, so backtracking to previously blocked sections with your new powers is satisfying. Carrion is a wildly creative entry and easily one of the most overlooked picks among the best Metroidvania games on Steam.

8. Dandara: Trials of Fear Edition

Leap between walls and ceilings with zero gravity holding you down

Dandara completely removes traditional walking and running from the equation. Your character, Dandara, exists in a world called Salt, where movement happens by launching yourself from surface to surface. Walls, ceilings, floors, they’re all fair game. You aim in a direction, leap, and stick to one of the surfaces you can jump to. And the whole map is designed around this mechanic, so rooms have surfaces scattered at angles that force you to think in 360 degrees at all times. The heroine herself, by the way, is inspired by a historical Brazilian figure named Dandara dos Palmares, a warrior who fought against slavery in the 17th century.

Since the movement is so unconventional, the combat follows suit. You charge up shots while clinging to a surface, release them at enemies in the room, and then leap to a new spot before incoming attacks reach you. The interconnected map has all the hallmarks you’d expect from the genre, with locked areas that require specific abilities to access, hidden collectibles, boss fights, and upgrades that open previously unreachable areas. I’d say the main thing to be aware of is that the first hour or so can feel awkward while your brain adjusts to the gravity-free movement. In short, Dandara separates itself from the pack by going all-in on reinventing how you get from point to point, and I respect that commitment.

7. Crypt Custodian

Clean up the afterlife as a dead cat with a broom

Crypt Custodian follows Pluto, a mischievous black cat who has recently died and ended up in the afterlife. Now, the afterlife here has a pretty strict hierarchy. There’s a palace, overseen by a giant bullfrog named Kendra, and she decides who gets inside. After a disastrous meeting with Kendra, Pluto gets banished and sentenced to janitorial duty outside the palace walls. So you’re armed with a broom, surrounded by other misbehaving ghosts, and tasked with sweeping trash for all of eternity. Obviously, Pluto is having none of it, and the adventure is about befriending those banished ghosts, cleaning up the afterlife, and plotting a way back inside.

Here, the map is viewed from a top-down perspective, which already separates it from most entries in this genre. You fight enemies with broom-based combat, collect new abilities to open up blocked paths, and explore a large interconnected world filled with puzzles and hidden areas. The ghosts you meet along the way all have backstories about how they died and why they got banished. Also, the writing has this warm, lighthearted tone that balances well against the “you are dead” premise. Lastly, boss encounters are creative and varied, with 13 across the full playthrough, and the difficulty options range from Easy to Hard.

6. ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist

Command defeated bosses as allies who fight alongside you

ENDER MAGNOLIA is a follow-up to ENDER LILIES, and if you played the first one, you’ll recognize the core idea here. You play as Lilac, an “Attuner” who can purify corrupted Homunculi and rally some of them as allies. The setting is a kingdom called the Land of Fumes, where artificial life forms known as Homunculi were created to help advance the kingdom. But toxic fumes from underground drove them mad, and now they’re rampaging across the land as feral monsters. Lilac wakes up in an underground laboratory with no memory, and from there, you piece together what happened while exploring this crumbling world.

Well, Lilac relies on her Homunculi for most of her offensive abilities. You can equip different companions for different attack types, from wide melee swings to ranged projectiles, and switch between their abilities mid-combat to create custom loadouts. The game offers 30 different skills across these companions, so there’s a lot of room to experiment. Movement through the world has the classic metroidvania loop of gated areas and ability-based unlocks, and some Homunculi grant you access to new traversal options. For the best Steam Metroidvania games in 2026 with deep combat customization, ENDER MAGNOLIA should be high on your checklist.

5. Rogue Legacy 2

Your family tree is the entire roster of playable heroes

Rogue Legacy 2 is the sequel to the original Rogue Legacy, which helped popularize roguelite meta-progression by blending it with Metroidvania-style exploration way back in 2013. And the sequel does everything the original did, multiplied by about ten. See, the whole concept here is generational inheritance. You pick a hero, you explore a sprawling, randomly generated kingdom, and when you die, well, your character’s child carries on. The wild part is that every heir can have different traits, classes, and abilities, which means the experience shifts with every single death.

I love this approach because it solves a problem I’ve always had with traditional roguelikes. You die, you lose everything, and you’re back at square one with zero motivation. Rogue Legacy 2 turns that on its head by letting you spend your collected gold on permanent upgrades to a family manor before your next run. And the traits on your heirs can be hilarious or downright challenging, like one kid might have poor vision where parts of your screen go blurry, and the next might be a giant-sized warrior who’s much harder to maneuver around hazards. Plus, there are 15 distinct classes to mess around with, from your standard sword-wielding knight to a frying-pan-wielding chef.

4. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

Persian mythology meets tight platforming and time-bending combat

Prince of Persia has been around since 1989. The franchise went through classic 2D platforming, jumped into 3D action during the Sands of Time era, and then major releases kind of went quiet for over a decade. The Lost Crown brought the series back, and it did so by returning to side-scrolling gameplay, which, in my opinion, is the best decision they could have made. You play as Sargon, a young warrior from an elite group called The Immortals, who gets caught up in a kidnapping plot involving a Persian prince. The story has its twists and turns involving time manipulation and ancient curses, and the narrative itself isn’t the main draw here, it sets up the world nicely.

In this game, the platforming here is razor-sharp, with wall-jumping, dashing, sliding, and aerial combos all flowing into each other seamlessly. And the further you go, the more the game introduces time-based powers that let you manipulate platforms, store objects for later, or create a shadow you can teleport back to. I’d rank this among the best Steam Metroidvania games in 2026 purely based on how the map is constructed, because it’s thoroughly interconnected, and you’re constantly spotting paths you can’t access yet until you earn the right ability. Ubisoft also added a snapshot feature where you can take a photo of a blocked path and pin it to your map as a reminder, which is a small touch I wish every metroidvania would steal.

3. Blasphemous 2

Dark religious fantasy with punishing combat and grotesque pixel art

Blasphemous 2 is the sequel to the 2019 indie hit from a Spanish studio, and the entire game is drenched in dark religious iconography drawn from Catholic and Spanish Baroque art. Twisted saints, bleeding statues, monstrous angelic figures, and grotesque pixel art that’s somehow gorgeous at the same time. You play as the Penitent One, a silent warrior on a holy crusade through a cursed world, and the visual identity here leans hard into this grim, painterly direction. It’s a 2D action-platformer metroidvania with Souls-like difficulty, where you explore interconnected zones and unlock new paths as you gain abilities.

Compared with the first game’s more limited weapon setup, Blasphemous 2 expands combat with three distinct weapons, letting you choose one at the start and discover the others later. Each has its own move-set and traversal ability. So your weapons help determine which environmental obstacles you can bypass and which routes open up to you, tying combat directly into the metroidvania exploration loop. Boss fights are varied, with different attack patterns and tighter pacing. The world layout also leans more into proper metroidvania design compared to the first game, with clearer zone gating and more satisfying backtracking loops. You’ll run into plenty of hidden rooms, locked doors, and shortcuts that connect different zones.

2. Dead Cells

Permadeath, branching routes, and wildly different runs every time

Dead Cells blends two genres that don’t usually go together, roguelike randomness on one side, metroidvania exploration on the other. You control the Beheaded, fighting through a sprawling interconnected island full of branching routes. So depending on how a run is going, you can choose between completely different paths to reach the end, which means no two attempts play out the same way. On top of that, your weapon loadout changes every run because gear drops are randomized, and pairing the right weapons together can turn you from weak to absurdly powerful in minutes. I’ve stumbled into combos where freezing enemies then shattering them wiped whole rooms clean, while on another attempt I ended up in a totally different playstyle because of what dropped.

Where Dead Cells earns my respect is the way it handles death. You lose your gear, your Cells, and most of your gold, then go back to the beginning. However, certain abilities you unlock along the way are permanent, so routes that were previously inaccessible open up across future attempts. In a way, dying is the core of how you explore, because each failed attempt teaches you enemy patterns, reveals new routes, and pushes you toward paths you would’ve skipped otherwise. The combat is incredibly responsive too, where dodge-rolling through attacks and chaining hits has a snappy, fast rhythm to it. Plus, the branching paths put you in a spot where you’re constantly making decisions on the fly, choosing routes based on your health and how strong your current build actually is.

1. Hollow Knight: Silksong

The strongest metroidvania game on Steam right now

Hollow Knight changed the metroidvania landscape when it dropped back in 2017. The original had hand-drawn art, an interconnected underground world, and combat that was weighty and deliberate, all packaged at a ridiculously low price point. So when the sequel was announced, the hype was unreal, and the years-long wait became a meme in itself. Hollow Knight: Silksong finally arrived, and it delivered on practically every front. You play as Hornet, who was a key side character in the original game, now thrust into a brand-new kingdom called Pharloom after being captured by mysterious veiled insects.

Hornet is a completely different character to control compared to the silent Knight from the first game. She’s faster, more agile, with needle-based attacks and silk abilities that emphasize aerial mobility and constant motion. The combat plays like a tightrope dance, where standing still for even a second can get you punished hard. The crafting mechanic is brand new to the series as well, letting you create tools, traps, and gadgets out of materials found throughout this world. Pharloom itself is enormous, with mossy grottos, gilded cities, misty moors, and dozens of interconnected areas full of secrets. Lastly, over 200 enemy types and 40+ boss encounters are scattered across the map, and the boss fights are some of the most spectacularly designed in the genre.

FAQs

Do I need to play the original Hollow Knight before trying Silksong?

You can jump into Silksong without prior experience because the story is set in a completely new kingdom called Pharloom with its own lore and characters. The protagonist Hornet appeared in the first game, but her journey here is self-contained enough to follow on its own. Playing the original will give you extra context about who she is, so if you have the time, it’s a great place to start before moving on to the sequel.

Can I enjoy Metroidvania games if I’m bad at difficult platformers?

Absolutely. Several entries on this list cater to different skill levels, and Crypt Custodian in particular is an excellent entry point because the difficulty stays approachable throughout the main story. Rogue Legacy 2 also eases the pressure because permanent upgrades between runs mean you grow stronger over time regardless of how often you fail. ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist includes multiple difficulty options too, so you can tailor the challenge to your comfort level.

Which of these Steam Metroidvania games are the longest?

Hollow Knight: Silksong is the largest on the list, with a map that dwarfs the original and over 40 boss encounters spread across it. Dead Cells can technically last hundreds of hours because the randomized runs and massive weapon pool create new combinations every time. Blasphemous 2 and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown both offer around 15 to 25 hours depending on how thoroughly you explore, so they sit in a comfortable middle ground.

Are any of these games playable in co-op or local multiplayer?

Metroidvanias are traditionally single-player experiences, and every entry on this list follows that pattern. If you are looking for something to play alongside a friend, you would need to take turns or watch each other play, which honestly pairs well with games like Rain World and Carrion because they are entertaining to spectate.

Which Metroidvania on this list has the most replay value?

Dead Cells leads comfortably here because the randomized level layouts, hundreds of weapon combinations, and multiple branching paths through the map mean no two runs are identical. Rogue Legacy 2 offers similar longevity through its heir system and randomized traits, so each attempt at the castle produces a fresh experience. Blasphemous 2 also encourages replays because the three starting weapons open different early-game routes.

What exactly is a Metroidvania, and how is it different from a regular platformer?

Metroidvania refers to a style of game where you explore a large, interconnected map and gradually unlock new abilities that let you access previously blocked areas. Regular platformers typically move you forward through separate levels in a linear sequence, but Metroidvanias encourage backtracking and revisiting old locations with fresh tools. The name itself blends Metroid and Castlevania, the two series that popularized this structure decades ago.

Which of these games has the most unique gameplay mechanic?

Dandara: Trials of Fear Edition stands apart because it removes walking entirely and has you leap between surfaces in any direction, so the entire movement system is unlike anything else in the genre. Carrion also breaks convention by casting you as the monster rather than the hero, and Crypt Custodian swaps the traditional side-scrolling view for a top-down perspective inspired by classic Zelda games.

Should I play these Metroidvania games with a controller or keyboard?

Controller is the preferred option for most players because the analog stick and responsive buttons suit the precise platforming these games require. Dandara is an exception worth noting because its surface-to-surface movement system translates well to mouse aiming, so keyboard and mouse can actually be the smoother choice there. Either input method will work across the entire list, so go with whatever you are most comfortable using.

Are there any story-heavy picks on this list for players who care about narrative?

ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist delivers one of the stronger narratives here, centered on the moral tension between saving humans or their artificial creations. Hollow Knight: Silksong weaves its story through environmental details, NPC dialogue, and item descriptions rather than cutscenes, so the lore runs deep if you pay attention. Crypt Custodian handles its themes of death and the afterlife with surprising emotional weight, especially toward the final act of the story.