What are the best Metroidvania games on PC? With mechanics that have spread to all genres, few things beat a good, traditional and sprawling Metroidvania. Mostly 2D with some straightforward combat, tricky platforming, light RPG mechanics, and abilities to find that help you explore castles, alien-infested planets, dungeons, caves, whimsical forests, and so on, it's quite difficult to put down a Metroidvania until you've beaten every boss and revealed every nook on the map. Exploration is key here, so if you're looking for 2D action platformers without much in the way of it, you won't find them here.
The two games that popularized the Metroidvania genre, Nintendo's Super Metroid and Konami's Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, aren't available on PC. For Nintendo it's understandable - they're notorious for keeping their franchises on their systems - but for some reason Konami hasn't brought unarguably the best Metroidvania game to PC yet. While we wait for them to get around to giving us a hopefully remastered taste of Alucard's journey(s) through Dracula's Castle, there's quite a few other Metroidvania games to play on PC - some recent, many of them cheap, and a few of them some of the best PC games ever made.
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