2025 was the year of the metroidvania, no question. While every genre saw a whole range of gems landing this year, fans of exploration-heavy platformers were positively feasting, with the centerpiece at the table being the long-awaited Hollow Knight: Silksong. A massive, polished, smartly designed and pleasantly familiar game that saw little need to uproot the first game's well-tested formula.
The now-ubiquitous portmanteau we use to describe the genre is, in itself, a reference to it being fertile ground for cross-pollinating ideas. Metroid's exploration dovetailed nicely with Castlevania's gothic stylings and Symphony Of The Night's surprisingly in-depth RPG elements, which Hollow Knight dials down the in favour of death mechanics and boss runbacks from Dark Souls. In recent years, we've seen plenty more experiments, with last year's Animal Well winning no shortage of praise by trading combat for ARG-adjacent layers of puzzling and cipher-cracking.
Primary Ingredient: Movement puzzles
Babushka's Glitch Dungeon
Price: $6/£5 | Developer: pets club 2
Ol' Babushka might have been able to run and jump like Samus Aran in her youth, but she's not much for agility these days. Or combat. What she has is a broom (good for whacking stuff, and dusting) and an aging mind capable of holding a whole two spells. But you'd be amazed at what two spells can do, combined carefully and with knowledge of what all the strange critters, glitches and objects do in this short-but-sweet puzzle explorathon.
Need to climb out of a pit and cross a chasm? Whack a worm to make it build a tower of earth. Then use the Ladder spell to walk up the side of it, then switch to the Air Walk spell halfway up so that you can hobble through the sky. But if you need a Feather Fall or the Ghost spell to touch deadly things, you'll have to forget something you were just relying on, and get up to some downright game-breaking shenanigans if you want every hidden collectible.
Primary Ingredients: 3D physics, Rhythm combat
Metro Gravity
Price: $13/£11 | Developer: mrkogamedev
Exploring a 2D space can be tricky at times. Exploring a 3D world where gravity is entirely subjective sounds like a nightmare, but somehow Metro Gravity makes it feel effortless. At least until you're asked to start creating gravity wells to move puzzle-blocks into place independently of YOUR relative gravity. And oh, the fun that you can have when you get a grappling hook, and a wrench that lets you rotate anything you can see, or a piece of magic thread that you can use to connect objects and conduct electricity, opening up new routes and potential puzzle solutions.
That would be plenty by itself, but Metro Gravity applies the same creativity to combat, having you deflect enemy attacks that sync up to the game's jazzy soundtrack. Cute against regular enemies, but spectacular in the music video-esque boss fights.
There's so many ideas flying around here that it would all be a bit overwhelming, if not for a remarkably readable 3D map and a cute in-game hint system where you can phone a friend for some cryptic-yet-awkward clues. A charming, weird adventure.
Primary Ingredient: Survival crafting & co-op
Primal Planet
Price: $20/£16.75 | Developer: Seethingswarm
Being a caveman in a genre defined by power-suited space-badasses feels like a bit of a step down, but Primal Planet's anachronistic world of primitive humans, hungry dinosaurs and gun-toting aliens made me respect the versatility of a pointy stone on a long stick. Spears are your bread and butter here—a semi-limited resource that can be crafted at campsites and work as weapons, platforms (if thrown into soft walls) or even ways to carry fire to light dark areas and ignite foliage blocking the way, if you can avoid getting them wet.
There are plenty of other things to craft that'll even the odds, including spike traps and throwing knives, but everything is in limited supply and you can only carry so much.
Progression is more RPG-esque than in most metroidvanias, with experience from combat (especially hunting bigger dinosaurs) letting you choose from an assortment of new recipes, tools, inventory space and the ability to swim longer and deeper, in whatever order you want. It's not quite Rain World's fully open sandbox (and nowhere near as cruel), but it's a less linear, more personal adventure than I'm used to in the genre. Plus, you're accompanied for most of the game by your pet dinosaur or a recruitable NPC buddy, which a friend can take control of at any time.
Primary Ingredient: Action RPG buildcrafting
Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree
Price: $40/£35 | Developer: Primal Game Studio
Soulslike combat has been a regular bedfellow for Metroidy games for a while now, but few lean as far into the crunchy stats and class-based, stamina-management combat as this one. It feels like the game's sprawling passive talent tree is cribbing notes from Path Of Exile, especially in how it lets you mix and match perks from six different classes. Progress is gated more by quest completion than unlocking mobility powers, but the hunt for every little nook and cranny to 100% your map completion is as compelling as it should be, especially as the combat is much more involved than your average platformer.
The combat focus dovetails nicely with speeding through the game in New Game Plus, which sprinkles in some upgraded enemy variants to keep things fresh. Plus it doesn't hurt that Mandragora is a gorgeous game, with some lovely matte painting backdrops, smoothly animated (and exaggeratedly cartoonish) monsters, and some remarkably grimdark fantasy politicking happening in the surprisingly lengthy script, courtesy of Vampire: Bloodlines' Brian Mitsoda clocking in as narrative lead.
Primary Ingredient: Extreme non-linearity
The Good Old Days
Price: $20/£16.75 | Developer: ヨコゴシステムズ
A spiritual successor to The Goonies videogame , this one throws traditional Metroid progression to the wind. Yes, there are items that you can find that unlock new paths, but mostly you'll be hunting for single-use gold and silver keys, which unlock doors to access new areas. Problem is, there always seem to be more doors than keys. And your goal isn't to reach the bottom of a grand underground labyrinth, but rather raise enough funds to clear your dad's debts, so whatever gets you more money is the way to go. Simple enough, but it's not hard to notice that a lot of key gates that seemed mandatory can be bypassed with some clever jumping, or through one of the game's many hidden passages. Potentially useful for speedruns, right?
And then it just ends—money raised (mostly through a lucky lottery ticket drop), day saved, credits rolled before even rescuing any of the other three playable characters. Had I found them, their movement powers would have provided more options to get around the world. But it's okay, because then the game starts again with a little bit less of the sepia post-processing haze in the way. There's also a higher money target, more story beats to be found and some of your precious items carried over.
Suddenly knowledge becomes absolute power. Every route remembered and key saved lets you push deeper, and suddenly sequence-breaking speedrunning antics become the core of the game. An intoxicating yet accessible taste of what it's like to sequence break a game wide open.
Primary Ingredient: Being truly avant-garde
Fourmiworld
Price: Free (with optional DLC) | Developer: CZDOOM
I've got to end with a shout-out to the one that breaks all the rules.
Fourmiworld is what happens when you throw formalism out the window. Yes, this is still an exploration platformer where you explore alien caverns, collect route-opening abilities and work towards a final goal. But the photo collage-styled world here is mostly made of destructible blocks, and the world map loops at the sides, top and bottom, allowing you to get around in downright bizarre ways. At least when your gun behaves—it's a gacha pod dispenser, firing a chaotic assortment of projectiles of varying usefulness and tunnelling capability.
The strange exploration (made weirder by the ability to flip gravity, unlocked early) makes for almost entirely freeform exploration, where progress on story objectives is gated mostly by knowledge, opening up all kinds of shortcuts and shenanigans for the speedrunning-inclined. While mostly free, the in-game codex (presented as the interdimensional explorer protagonist's Geocities-style blog) does cost a few bucks. A nice way to throw the developer a few bones if you enjoyed the game.
And if that one isn't different enough to stir your spirit, then you'd better let us know what's even wilder in the comments below.
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