10 Best Metroidvania Games on Steam (June 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 living world that hunts, shifts, and punishes carelessness

Rain World is a survival platformer set in a post-industrial world of collapsed civilizations and flooded ruins. You play as a Slugcat, a small creature separated from its family, trying to survive long enough to reunite with them. The world is massive and interconnected, spread across distinct regions with radically different visual identities. Predators like lizards, vultures, and centipedes patrol these regions with their own behavioral logic. They hunt based on sight and sound, retreat when injured, and adapt to repeated encounters over time.

The world was not designed around your convenience. Creatures eat, sleep, and move through it entirely on their own terms, regardless of where you are or what you are doing. Spears are your primary tool for self-defense, though throwing one at a lizard often does little more than slow it down briefly. Rain cycles punctuate every session, and you must reach shelter before the downpour begins or face certain death.

9. Carrion

You are the monster, and the humans are the prey

Carrion is a horror action game where you control a rapidly growing alien creature escaping from an underground research facility. The premise flips the typical power dynamic of the genre entirely. Soldiers and security systems are the obstacles standing between you and freedom, and you tear through them as an unstoppable mass of flesh and tentacles. The creature has no name, no backstory delivered through cutscenes, and no moral compass. Its only drive is spreading outward and consuming whatever stands in its path. The facility housing it spans multiple interconnected zones, each locked behind either biomass thresholds or specific abilities the creature unlocks by growing larger and absorbing organic material.

Biomass functions as both a health system and a progression gate. Absorbing enemies and organic matter increases your size, and crossing certain biomass thresholds permanently unlocks new biological abilities. Larger forms can pull objects toward you with tentacles or smash through reinforced doors. Shrinking down lets the creature slip through narrow vents and access areas a larger form cannot reach. Traversal is fluid and physical, with the creature latching onto surfaces, swinging across gaps, and flooding into tight spaces with a rippling, tentacle-driven motion.

8. Dandara: Trials of Fear Edition

Dash from wall to ceiling across rooms filled with traps and enemies

Dandara: Trials of Fear Edition redefines how movement works in the Metroidvania genre. The protagonist, Dandara, cannot walk or run in any traditional sense. She launches herself between surfaces, attaching to floors, walls, and ceilings by leaping across open spaces. This zero-gravity traversal system is built into every aspect of level design, with the world’s architecture constructed around this unique movement style. The result is a game where navigation itself becomes a skill to develop, and revisiting earlier areas with new abilities reveals entirely new routes through spaces you thought you understood.

Attacking involves launching projectiles while repositioning constantly, requiring spatial awareness rather than reflex alone. Boss encounters are inventive and often demand understanding the physics of your own movement before anything else. The Trials of Fear Edition expands on the original release with additional content, including new areas and deeper story context woven into the existing world. Among the best Metroidvania Steam games 2026 list, Dandara occupies a unique position for its commitment to reinventing how you move through a Metroidvania world.

7. Ori and the Will of the Wisps

Guide Ori through a beautiful world filled with danger

Ori and the Will of the Wisps is among the most visually stunning platforming games available on Steam. The hand-painted environments shift across biomes with extraordinary artistic detail, from luminous forests to flooded ruins and sunlit deserts. Moon Studios pushed further with this sequel by expanding the fighting system significantly over the original Ori and the Blind Forest. The interconnected map is large, with secrets tucked behind environmental puzzles and ability-gated routes scattered across every region.

Movement in Will of the Wisps is precise and deeply expressive, with Ori’s ability set expanding across the adventure through dashing, bursting through certain surfaces, and launching off airborne enemies to chain vertical height. Learning how these abilities interact with each other opens up increasingly creative ways to traverse the world. The game runs smoothly at high frame rates and scales well across different hardware. For the best Metroidvania Steam games in 2026, this title remains one of the most visually and mechanically polished entries the genre has to offer on PC.

6. ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist

Restore corrupted beings to fight alongside you in a poisoned world

ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist is set in a kingdom ravaged by toxic mist that corrupted the mechanical homunculi originally created to serve its people. You control Lilac, a young Attuner with the rare ability to purify these corrupted homunculi and bring them back under her protection. The story surfaces gradually through environmental detail and brief conversations, and the weight of what happened to this civilization becomes increasingly clear the deeper you explore. Each restored homunculus joins Lilac permanently and contributes a distinct set of offensive or defensive abilities to her arsenal.

Switching between homunculi mid-fight is the foundation of how encounters operate. Each restored companion offers a fundamentally different attack style, ranging from wide-area strikes to precise projectile fire, and understanding when to deploy each one separates efficient runs from drawn-out struggles. Boss encounters are elaborate and visually distinct, requiring you to read attack patterns carefully before committing to a response. ENDER MAGNOLIA draws from the same creative lineage as ENDER LILIES, the studio’s previous title, and shares its signature visual direction of Gothic imagery rendered in soft, painterly tones.

5. Rogue Legacy 2

One of Steam’s most unique platforming games of all time

Rogue Legacy 2 is a roguelite Metroidvania where you play as a continuous bloodline of heroes, and when your current character dies, you choose the next heir from a pool of descendants to continue the run. The gold collected during each attempt goes toward permanent upgrades between runs, so even a failed run contributes to long-term progression. The castle and its surrounding regions shift layout between attempts, so the geography stays familiar in a broad sense without ever repeating itself exactly.

Each heir carries randomly assigned traits, like being colourblind, and these traits subtly change how you perceive or interact with the world in small but memorable ways. Permanent upgrades accumulate through a sprawling skill tree, and the investments you make between runs determine how your heir approaches the next attempt. There is no single correct path through the upgrade tree, and two players with equal hours invested can end up with very different strengths depending on their preferences. The boss encounters here are the clearest test of how well you have absorbed the world’s mechanics.

4. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

One of the best action platformers on PC

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is an action platformer from Ubisoft Montpellier, and it marks a full reimagining of the Prince of Persia franchise in the Metroidvania format. You play as Sargon, a warrior from an elite group called the Immortals, sent on a mission to rescue the kidnapped Prince from a cursed mountain. The world is rooted in Persian mythology, and the regions you travel through carry a strong visual identity drawn from that cultural backdrop. Sargon is agile and aggressive from the moment you take control.

Time manipulation powers are central to how Sargon explores and fights across the mountain. Abilities like freezing a shadow of yourself in place and teleporting back to it open up traversal routes and offensive opportunities that completely reshape how you approach a given area. Revisiting earlier regions with newly acquired powers consistently reveals paths and secrets that were invisible on your previous visit. The parry and dodge mechanics demand precise reads of enemy attack windows. The boss roster in particular stands out for the sheer variety in how each encounter is structured, with visual spectacle matched by mechanical depth.

3. Blasphemous 2

Fight grotesque monsters across a broken religious kingdom

Blasphemous 2 is the sequel to the critically praised Blasphemous, and The Game Kitchen expanded the scope of the world considerably in this follow-up. You return as the Penitent One, a silent knight bound by guilt and duty, continuing a journey through a decaying religious world steeped in dark imagery and suffering. The pixel art across every region is extraordinarily detailed, and the enemy designs reflect a world where devotion has curdled into something disturbing and inescapable. The structure of the world is more open in this sequel compared to the original, and you are actively encouraged to explore regions in a sequence of your own choosing.

Three weapons are available to you, and each one carries a completely different offensive style along with its own dedicated skill tree to develop over time. Choosing between them is less about picking the strongest option and more about finding the playstyle that clicks with how you naturally approach encounters. Boss encounters in this game are visually spectacular in a way that stands out even among the strongest entries in the genre. Blasphemous 2 took the foundation of a beloved predecessor, addressed the criticisms that surrounded the original, and delivered a more confident and complete experience across every dimension.

2. Dead Cells

A relentless roguelite Metroidvania with fluid combat and endless replayability

Dead Cells has maintained its position near the top of the genre since launch, and continued updates have only strengthened its place on the best Metroidvania games Steam catalog. Every run through the game is procedurally generated, so the layout of corridors, enemy placements, and item drops rearrange themselves each time you start fresh after a death. The core loop is straightforward: fight through increasingly difficult areas, collect weapons and abilities along the way, and try to push further than your last attempt. Permanent upgrades earned between runs ensure that repeated deaths translate into measurable progress rather than pure frustration.

The weapon variety is one of the most impressive aspects of the entire experience, covering fast melee options, ranged bows, throwable weapons, and deployable traps that can be combined in ways that produce wildly different results. Multiple DLC expansions have been released over the years, each introducing new biomes, weapons, and bosses that maintain the quality of the original release. Dead Cells occupies the second position on this list because the combination of polish, depth, and sheer replayability across hundreds of hours is nearly unmatched across the best Metroidvania games Steam has ever produced.

1. Hollow Knight: Silksong

The long-awaited platforming sequel fans have been watching for years

Hollow Knight: Silksong finally arrived and delivered everything fans of the original hoped for and more. Team Cherry placed Hornet at the center of her own story, taking her from a secondary figure in Hallownest to the full protagonist of a new kingdom called Pharloom. The world is built vertically as much as horizontally, and Hornet’s movement kit from the start is more acrobatic and aggressive than the Knight’s ever was. The kingdom of Pharloom is dense with interconnected regions, each carrying a distinct visual identity and a completely different set of enemies, requiring you to adjust your approach rather than rely on the same patterns that served you in previous areas.

Hornet’s traversal abilities expand steadily across the journey. The boss roster is exceptional in both volume and variety, ranging from encounters that are visually haunting to multi-phase battles that demand genuine mastery of Hornet’s full range of movement and attacks. Silksong earns the top position on the best Metroidvania Steam games 2026 list because Team Cherry refined an already beloved formula, introduced a protagonist full of conviction and physicality, and constructed a world that rewards every hour you invest in uncovering it.

FAQs

1. What are the best Metroidvania games on Steam in 2026?

The Steam library has an exceptional range of Metroidvania titles in 2026, covering everything from brutally difficult action platformers to emotionally driven exploration games. Hollow Knight: Silksong sits at the top, followed closely by Dead Cells and Blasphemous 2. If you want variety, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and Rogue Legacy 2 offer very different takes on the genre while maintaining the same quality of exploration and progression that defines the best entries.

2. Is Hollow Knight: Silksong worth playing if you haven’t played the original?

Hollow Knight: Silksong is a standalone game with its own protagonist, world, and narrative, so prior knowledge of the original is not required to enjoy it. The kingdom of Pharloom is introduced on its own terms, and the mechanics are taught through exploration rather than tutorials. That said, playing the original Hollow Knight gives you a deeper appreciation for Hornet as a character and the world she inhabits.

3. Which Metroidvania on Steam is best for someone who doesn’t mind dying repeatedly?

Dead Cells and Rogue Legacy 2 are the two strongest picks for players who are comfortable with repeated deaths as part of the progression loop. Both games are built on the idea that each failed run teaches you something and contributes to long-term growth through permanent upgrades. Dead Cells leans into weapon variety and run diversity, while Rogue Legacy 2 leans into class experimentation and a persistent family legacy system.

4. Which Steam Metroidvania has the best boss fights?

Hollow Knight: Silksong, Blasphemous 2, and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown all have exceptional boss rosters, each for different reasons. Blasphemous 2 delivers visually spectacular encounters rooted in grotesque religious imagery. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown balances spectacle with tight mechanical demands. Silksong offers the widest variety in boss design, ranging from haunting and atmospheric to relentlessly demanding multi-phase battles.

5. What is the difference between a Metroidvania and a roguelite?

Metroidvania refers to games with interconnected maps that gradually open up as you unlock new abilities, rewarding backtracking and exploration. Roguelites introduce procedurally generated runs and permanent death, with upgrades that persist between attempts. Dead Cells and Rogue Legacy 2 sit at the intersection of both genres, combining the exploration structure of a Metroidvania with the run-based progression of a roguelite.

6. Which Metroidvania on this list is the most visually distinctive?

Blasphemous 2 and Ori and the Will of the Wisps sit at opposite ends of the visual spectrum and are both worth mentioning here. Blasphemous 2 delivers extraordinarily detailed pixel art soaked in dark religious imagery. Ori and the Will of the Wisps is one of the most visually stunning games on Steam regardless of genre, with hand-painted environments and lighting that few games come close to matching.

7. Are any of these Metroidvania games available on Steam Deck?

Most titles on this list are verified or playable on Steam Deck. Dead Cells, Blasphemous 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown all perform well in handheld mode. Checking the Steam Deck compatibility rating on each game’s store page before purchasing is always recommended, as patches and updates can change compatibility status over time.

8. Which game on this list is shortest in length?

Carrion is the shortest experience on the list, designed as a focused and tightly paced adventure rather than a sprawling exploration game. Most players complete it in four to six hours. If you want something meatier, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Blasphemous 2, and Dead Cells all offer significantly longer experiences, with Dead Cells in particular extending into hundreds of hours through its roguelite structure and DLC content.

9. Which Metroidvania on Steam has the most replayability?

Dead Cells has the highest replayability on this list by a considerable margin, largely because procedurally generated runs and an enormous weapon pool ensure that repeated playthroughs rarely feel identical. Rogue Legacy 2 follows closely, with its randomised heir traits and class variety extending the experience across dozens of hours. Both games also received substantial post-launch content that expanded their already deep systems.

10. Is Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown connected to the older Prince of Persia games?

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown shares the franchise name and draws from Persian mythology, but the protagonist is Sargon rather than the Prince himself, and the story operates independently from the older entries in the series. You do not need any familiarity with previous Prince of Persia titles to follow the narrative or enjoy the game. Ubisoft Montpellier positioned the game as a fresh entry point rather than a continuation of any prior storyline.