You might associate the platformer with console gaming as Nintendo claims many of the biggest ones and they’re usually best played with—gasp—a controller, but don’t count the PC gamers out. The scene would be unrecognizable without all the indie hits that first found a home on Steam, and early attempts to mimic that plumber in the red hat led to the tech that gave us Doom.
So dust off that gamepad and embrace the inherent fun of jumping over stuff with me. It’s a genre largely unbeleaguered by big-budget bloat, intent on retaining the purity of old-school action at its best. Platformers remain fascinated with the ability of the videogame to sate a primordial human urge: to run, be free, and soar weightlessly over certain doom. From cerebral puzzle platformers, to parkour simulations, to cotton candy collectathons, the genre is as diverse and worth celebrating as it’s ever been.
Best 2D Platformers
Spelunky
Platforming speciality: Sublime systemic chaos | Link: Steam
Perhaps the most iconic PC platformer on the list (it originally released as source-available freeware), Spelunky mashes together two things that should be an awful fit: the side-scrolling platformer, which thrives on handcrafted level layouts, and procedural generation. The result is a dastardly difficult and frustrating game—you can’t memorize a given challenge since the levels are different each time, and around every corner lurks a trap or venomous snake you’re encountering for the first time. But soon enough, something magical happens: rather than mastering each level, you start to master the game’s basic building blocks, preparing you for the thousands of deaths the caves throw at you.
An early example is dart traps, which start as a lethal annoyance, but quickly become opportunities: fool its trigger by tossing a pot or a rock, and pick up the dart for yourself to take out foes from range. It’s the rare platformer you could spend hundreds of hours in and still have new interactions to uncover, and it’s up there with the most rewarding games ever built. Even without the countless secrets to find it’s a stunner, but once you start uncovering those secrets? It’s a singular, special experience.
You should absolutely play the sequel, Spelunky 2, as well, but given that it’s even deeper and more challenging, I’d start with the original.
Rayman Legends
Platforming speciality: Smooth co-op and loads of levels | Link: Steam
If you want a 2D platformer that takes after the family-friendly Mario mold, you’d be hard-pressed to do better than Rayman Legends. While it lacks some of the jokey writing and sense of world you get in previous Raymans, it goes all in where it counts: the levels. It is a ludicrously huge bonanza of well over 100 levels, each of which squeezes every last drop of potential out of a novel motif before swiftly moving on. One world is played with a stealth mechanic, half-underwater, another involves riding air currents up a highly vertical forest, and every world is capped off with a musical mad dash where every obstacle is timed to songs like Woo Hoo by The 5.6.7.8’s and Black Betty.
Rayman himself controls marvelously, able to glide, ground pound, and enjoy wild hangtime as he socks foes in mid-air. That the game is playable in anarchic four-player co-op and contains enough collectibles to pad out half a dozen more platformers is just icing on the cake. It’s a bar-setting game in the genre.
Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty
Platforming speciality: Puzzles, fart jokes, social commentary | Link: Steam
If you relish a good challenge, Oddworld has you covered. Protagonist Abe is an alien floor waxer for RuptureFarms, a merciless meat processing plant planning to grind up its enslaved workforce into the suits’ next product. Where other platformers are about stylish, freeform movement, most of Oddworld is spent poring over a screen’s every detail, making an exact mental plan of how to squeeze past every obstacle, and praying you don’t get mangled by spinning saw blades when you finally decide to make a run for it. One wrong move, and you’re dead.
Oddworld isn’t about the joy of acrobatics, but the burden of responsibility. It’s gory and grim, urging you on with hundreds of fellow workers that need rescuing and the occasional (okay, the frequent) fart joke. Whether you end up mincemeat or the savior of your people depends on your willingness to try, die, and try again ad nauseum. While New ‘n’ Tasty is a remake that lacks some of the visual grime that makes the original Abe’s Oddysee such a looker, its strides in accessibility and compatibility with modern machines make it the best way to experience the game today—and what a bizarre, enchanting game it is.
Freedom Planet 2
Platforming speciality: Better Sonic than Sonic | Link: Steam
It may look like a Sonic fangame, but rather than revel in nostalgia, Freedom Planet 2 uses the high-speed exploration of games like Sonic 3 as a springboard for new ideas, including a narrative campaign with hub areas and boss fights galore. There are four playable characters, each with their own Smash Bros.-esque movesets, and the pixel art stuns on each mazelike stage.
Freedom Planet 2 operates on an action movie-like scale that few 2D platformers can boast, and at its best, feels like a Saturday morning cartoon brought to life by Sega or Treasure in their prime. It’s an easy recommendation to anyone who wants a game that pays homage to Sonic’s 2D outings while very much doing its own thing, all at a blistering pace.
Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins Resurrection
Platforming speciality: Old school challenge, retouched | Link: Steam
The Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins series laid the foundation for what would become known as the masocore platformer: ultra-hard games where every inch of progress takes blood, sweat, and maybe a broken controller or two. It’s not fair, honestly, or particularly interested in showing you a good time, and that’s precisely what makes it so satisfying. To beat Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins is to learn every step in a linear, static, but nonetheless mind-numbingly difficult routine, and to play it is to let your ego utterly liquefy in the ultimate crucible. If you’ve ever wondered if you have what it takes to «git gud,» this is the only test you need.
There are easier difficulty settings and a co-op mode in Resurrection, so you can dial the heat down a tad. But this game is meant to be played on Legend mode in the wee hours of the morning with bloodshot eyes, like a starving caveman running down a wild boar with a stone hatchet and a dream. Victory is yours, if you could only seize it.
Pizza Tower
Platforming speciality: Relentlessly paced cartoon chaos | Link: Steam
If you want a relaxing platformer where it’s easy to take your time and unwind, Pizza Tower is not the game you should play. It is a frantic riff on Wario Land 4 where each level is replete with gimmicks and new forms of mayhem that, while it might look hastily assembled, is meticulously built for speedrunners and score attackers alike.
It’s a neurotic Nicktoon fraying at the edges and foaming at the mouth, but despite the manic aesthetic, it’s among the most inviting score attack games around. You don’t die when you get hit in most circumstances, you’re just docked points—while reaching for those P-ranks will take a lot of memorization and practice, the game makes trying and retrying fun and straightforward. Even if your interest ends with getting through the game casually, its offbeat humor and fun stages should have no trouble holding your attention until the end. It helps that Peppino controls exceptionally, despite his visible and infectious chronic anxiety.
Celeste
Platforming speciality: The kindest masocore challenge | Link: Steam
Where some difficult platformers seem to enjoy kicking the player while they’re down (looking at you, Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins), Celeste is a considered challenge that always tests the player but rarely punishes them much. When you die, you usually just go back a few moments in time due to the game’s ultra-generous checkpoint system. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, though. Far from it.
It’s a heartfelt narrative about climbing a mountain both literally and metaphorically and, not by accident, it can also feel like climbing a mountain when you die on a given section 20 times in a row. But before long, you’ll be shocked at what you were capable of just by trying again relentlessly. The way its story and mechanics intertwine is beautiful in a way few platformers even reach for, so I wouldn’t count it out if you’re intimidated by the difficulty: it’s one of a kind.
The Masocore Hall of Fame
Celeste stands atop the summit of demanding platformers that coax the best out of their players, but it was preceded by several other phenomenal 2D games, each of which found brilliance in simple running and jumping:
- N++ — The purest platformer ever made, with endless levels
- Super Meat Boy — «Meat» the face of true dispair in an indie icon
- The End Is Nigh — A slower-paced, more precision-focused branch of Meat Boy difficulty
Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove
Platforming speciality: 8-bit pogoing, but nicer | Link: Steam
Shovel Knight was one of the best indie throwbacks to hit the scene when it released in 2014, and it’s only gotten better since then. Four full platformer campaigns in one game with a hectic PvP mode to boot, «Treasure Trove» is a spot-on descriptor for Yacht Club’s masterwork.
The original campaign’s DNA is all DuckTales, Mega Man, and various Mario games, which might make it sound indistinct. Instead, it’s a greatest hits compilation made up of the 2D platformer’s stickiest ideas, and it all works because the execution is tight beyond comparison. The result is greater than the sum of its parts, and when the sequel campaigns start remixing the core action with new movesets and unorthodox gimmicks, Shovel Knight switches from a celebration of past platformers to a case study in modern 2D excellence.
Mark of the Ninja: Remastered
Platforming speciality: Watertight stealth puzzle boxes | Link: Steam
We’ve reached a point where ninja-themed platformers really deserve their own list, but I think Mark of the Ninja is their best representative for a simple reason: on top of being a great platformer and action game, it’s a rock solid stealth game in its own right, up there with the Splinter Cells and Hitmans of the world. In other words, you do more ninja stuff than you might even in other ninja games. Now that’s what I call value for money!
Klei’s hand-drawn visuals do a lot to sell the fantasy on offer, and the game packs all the patient decision-making of a puzzle platformer while still letting you get your katana wet every once in a while. It’s not as speedy or freeform as a straight-up platformer, but the different ability-altering costumes available in Mark of the Ninja mean there’s still plenty of room to tailor the action to your tastes.
Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair
Platforming speciality: Meat & potatoes, served up cozy | Link: Steam
Yooka-Laylee’s 3D debut didn’t exactly light the world on fire, but Playtonic’s sudden left-turn into Donkey Kong Country-esque 2D platforming yielded something special in Impossible Lair. The premise is novel as all get out: you’re quickly thrown into a level so difficult it’s nearly unbeatable, and then after you (probably) die, journey through a grab-bag of platformer worlds to secure additional hit points usable only on the titular final stage. Like the Donkey Kong games that inspired it, Impossible Lair is an approachable but worthwhile challenge—not to be missed if you yearn for the days of the Super Nintendo.
Best 3D Platformers
Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom
Platforming speciality: Impeccable movement feel | Link: Steam
There’s this idea in platformer design once coined as the «toy factor»: the idea that a 3D game should be fun to run around in and treat like a toy, even if there are no enemies or obstacles on screen. Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom embodies that quality more than most, with a unique and addicting control setup where you race around as an air-dashing wind-up taxi. Unlike hedgehogs and pizza chefs, taxis don’t get a dedicated jump button, so platforming is all about momentum, ramps, and angles.
Its levels are open zones stuffed to the gills with collectibles, reminiscent of Super Mario Sunshine or Banjo-Kazooie. The game is elevated purely by its feel and sound design—every screeching halt and obstacle quashed massages the eyes and ears with a satisfying pop and whip of feedback. It’s a sugar rush of compact levels dense with gubbins to find, and it’s worth playing just to race around in circles and zoom off ramps at mach speeds. I highly recommend a controller with rumble on.
Super Mario 64
Platforming speciality: The 3D platformer | Link: sm64coopdx
But wait, this is a console-exclusive game from 30 years ago! Welcome to PC gaming, where the grass is greener and volunteer programmers work on native ports of games like Super Mario 64 to Windows for a lark. This version is probably most notable for its modability and the sheer impressiveness that it just… works, but it’s still Super Mario 64, man. You do need to bring your own game files, but your reward is the most customizable and feature-rich version of the game to date.
Super Mario 64 wasn’t the first 3D game, but it was a showstopping demonstration of how good they could feel to play, and features a list of maneuvers that’s extensive even now. Where other games from the early days of 3D struggle to make sense of the new dimension, Mario 64 feels uninhibited; it’s as if Mario was always meant to leap in every imaginable direction, take flight, and soar into the clouds. Modern platformers still struggle to match the superlative smoothness of this game’s movement decades on, and if you’re a real freak, you can join one of the biggest speedrunning scenes in videogame history.
And as long as you’re on the fanmade port train, definitely give a look to the OpenGOAL version of Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. Don’t tell anyone, but I kinda like that game even more.
Psychonauts 2
Platforming speciality: Mindbending stages, laugh out loud dialogue | Link: Steam
The original Psychonauts was tailor-made to be a cult classic: it was remarkably imaginative and one of the better collectathons of its day despite selling like, well, whatever the opposite of «gangbusters» is, after a dismal development cycle. Living up to the retroactive hype that built as word spread of its quality online could have been an insurmountable challenge for Psychonauts 2, but to its credit, it’s just that good.
It’s the rare platformer with oodles of dialogue and a delightfully dense narrative both pulpy and paranormal. You play as Raz, a young operative for a group of psychic spies, and journey through people’s minds, represented as explorable, surreal dreamscapes. It’s loaded with rad psychic powers to unlock, collectibles to nab, and satisfying, simple platforming, but it stands out from the crowd in that it spins a yarn like no other.
Hot Lava
Platforming speciality: Bouncy first person physics | Link: Steam
Hot Lava is an underappreciated banger, and I think it packs a particularly appealing proposition for PC gamers. While its cartoony, action figure-centric aesthetic might make you think you’re in for another cutesy collectathon, this is actually a parkour game that emphasizes the bunnyhopping, air strafing, and surfing mechanics you might be familiar with from Counter-Strike or even Quake.
To put it more plainly, there’s a detailed, weighty sense of movement in this game that suits its highly replayable, modular, arcadey setup to a T. It’s less concerned with reality than a game like Mirror’s Edge, letting the joy of slowly building momentum and subtly correcting precise jumps midair take the reins. If you want to replay the same levels over and over, shaving off milliseconds as you do it, Hot Lava is tailor-made for you.
All that being said, if you’ve never touched Counter-Strike, Hot Lava’s lighthearted, colorful vibe and slow ramp-up in difficulty makes it inviting to players of all stripes and skill levels. The online modes are pretty quiet these days, but it’s plenty of fun solo.
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A Hat in Time
Platforming speciality: A nonstop stream of new scenarios | Link: Steam
If you get bored easily and want a game that moves on to the next idea just as you’re adjusting to the last one, A Hat in Time is an easy recommendation. It’s another cartoony throwback all about grabbing tons of collectibles, but the levels are fresh and imaginative enough to convert even the weariest of cynics. One level plunges the player into the panicked rhythm of a horror game. Another is an extended parody of Murder on the Orient Express. And if you’re looking for a test of skill, the game’s time rift levels strip away all the set dressing and demand you put your midair dives where your mouth is.
A Hat in Time has an infectious whimsy about it, and that helps drown out any sense that you’ve seen this all before if you’ve played a collectathon or 20. The foundations are familiar, but they’re shot across space on a tour of one novel gimmick after another. The result is an irresistibly fun patchwork of novelties that still feels distinct nearly a decade on.
Sonic Adventure 2
Platforming speciality: Nostalgia (we’re really here for the Chao) | Link: Steam
Sonic Adventure 2 wants so desperately to be awesome, and that it succeeds despite being about neon-tinted woodland animals wearing Mickey Mouse gloves is a miracle worth witnessing. It introduces Sonic’s twisted, tragic counterpart, Shadow the Hedgehog. It centers a sprawling, superhero comic-esque narrative where the fate of the earth hangs in the balance. «Talk about low-budget flights!» Sonic quips as he prepares to dive from a G.U.N. helicopter, using a chunk of its wing like a snowboard. Minutes later, you’re barely outpacing a semi-truck as it rockets toward the screen at you. Is everything that happens in Sonic Adventure 2 completely batshit? You’ll be moving too fast to care.
It’s a little rough these days (though mods can sand off some of the edges, making PC the best place to play it) and there are more polished Sonic games around: the excellent Mania and Frontiers, for example. But Sonic at its most agreeable is no match for Sonic at its most audacious, and that’s exactly what Sonic Adventure 2 is. Both the «hero» and «dark» stories hop gleefully between treasure hunts, mech walker shootouts, and high-speed chases, challenging you to do it all faster with each run through.
It’s as bold now as it was back in 2001, and I’ve never played a 3D platformer with as memorable a campaign. If you don’t care about any of that, there’s still hundreds of hours to be lost in the Chao Garden, Sonic Adventure’s unique virtual pet minigame.
Mirror’s Edge
Platforming speciality: Parkour! Parkour!! | Link: Steam
When it released in 2008, Mirror’s Edge burned through the grey sludge of the day’s trendy photoreal FPS like a concentrated beam of pure sunlight. While first-person platforming was nothing new, it was never approached with such loving detail as it was here. All the joy of technical, game-y movement is here, but it’s got one foot planted in the realities of parkour; you need to build up momentum as you run, bound over obstacles by sliding and leaping, balance on narrow walkways, and break your falls with a well-timed somersault.
It’s also got a unique combat system where you’re mostly disarming enemies and outmaneuvering them rather than resorting to overkill. Mirror’s Edge commitment to reality pays off—it’s one of the only games that still makes my stomach drop with a long enough fall. There’s nothing else quite like it, which makes it a worthwhile pickup if you have even a passing interest.
Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania
Platforming speciality: Oh, Banana | Link: Steam
Maybe you could do without a big story, without all the set dressing, without anything that gets between you and the core components that make a platformer fun: bottomless pits and somewhere to be. Despite its cuddly mascots, there’s a brutalism about Monkey Ball; it’s just you, the goal, anything in your way, and a timer. It’s the purest shot of 3D platforming you can find, and you don’t even control a character—instead, you twist and turn the level geometry trying to propel your monkey ball toward the exit.
Banana Mania is hard, but not overwhelmingly so, and it features a whopping 300+ levels from various Monkey Ball games as well as a slew of party games to try, assuming you manage to rope some friends in. If you’re a purist, mods can help get the physics a bit closer to the originals, and if you’re new to the series, you’ve got enough game here to chew on for ages.
Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy
Platforming speciality: 3D platforming that’s kinda 2D platforming | Link: Steam
Where other early 3D platformers struggled to get their cameras right and eased players into the new dimension with open, easygoing worlds to explore, Crash Bandicoot retained the course-clearing intensity of games like Donkey Kong Country and chucked players into a linear, hazard-filled meat grinder with a fixed perspective. The N. Sane Trilogy is an affectionate if ever so slightly altered remake of the first three Crash games, and stands on its own as a colorful smorgasbord of great stages.
It’s not the series to play if you like to style on a game by mastering its movement; Crash games demand precision whether you’re fleeing from a boulder toward the screen or trying to keep an auto-running jungle boar from crashing into a wall of spikes. In that way, they zig where other 3D platformers zag—but if you’re up for a challenging, fast-paced 3D platformer that almost plays more like a 2D game, Crash still hits with a distinct flavor.
Cavern of Dreams
Platforming speciality: N64-style collectathon, nicely updated | Link: Steam
There are too many retro-inspired platformers on PC to count, but few feel quite so accurate to the Nintendo 64 era as Cavern of Dreams, a game that manages to be cutesy and approachable to anyone without sacrificing atmosphere or expressive movement. It’s a friendly fairy tale told in dreamlike hues with puzzles and exploration that reward poking around every corner, as well as using Fynn the Dragon’s deceptively simple moveset to its full potential. Its benign exterior makes it a great game for kids, but I got a whiff of poignant, peaceful nostalgia while playing myself—it’s the videogame equivalent to a warm quilt adorned in the dead of winter.
…and Team Fortress 2 (BEAR WITH ME)
Platforming speciality: Jump up, jump up, and get down | Link: Steam
When some ancient hunter-gatherer first pried a ripe grape from the vine, they had no way of knowing the fermented byproduct of that fruit would be so potent, delicious, and prized. It was Georgian agricultural laborers that started cultivating the grape specifically for wine production, and the art form that is vinification continues to mature to this day. In the case of Team Fortress 2, a single item—the Soldier’s stock Rocket Launcher—is the grape. Jump maps are the wine, along with any other community maps that forego combat and make a playground for the game’s movement tech.
So yes, elephant in the room, Team Fortress 2 is mostly a class-based FPS and not a platformer. But I feel it’s apropos to furnish this list with an entry that truly speaks to the beating heart of PC gaming: modding, tinkering, and do-it-yourself experimentation. Jump maps, easily accessed from the server browser by searching «jump» (jump_academy2 is a good one to cut your teeth on), are custom fanmade obstacle courses that test your skills with the game’s rocket jump mechanics. While that might sound janky, when mastered, you can soar around each map at speeds that feel and look absurd. The community around them still persists to this day, and it’s never too late to hone your skills.
It’s also going to make you way better at Soldier, if you ever return to playing Team Fortress as intended. Not sure why you would, though. The real game is right here!
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