What are the best Metroidvania games on PC? With mechanics that have spread to all genres, few games beat a sprawling Metroidvania. Mostly 2D with some straightforward combat, tricky platforming, and light RPG mechanics, a Metroidvania demands you use all the abilities at your disposal to explore castles, alien-infested planets, whimsical forests, and so on.

Nintendo’s Super Metroid and Konami’s Castlevania: Symphony of the Night popularized the Metroidvania, but the genre has come into its own since these inaugural titles. While many of the best Metroidvania PC games try to recapture the spirit of their forebears, others expand into new territories by incorporating mechanics from pinball and soulslikes. The result is a dynamic genre that offers a wealth of familiar and fresh experiences - some recent, many of them cheap, and a few of them some of the best PC games ever made.