The best platformer games were only available on consoles, but now the genre is doing well on PC. Independents have used the main ideas in a million different ways (but still generally from left to right). This article will share a list of the best PC platform games, including puzzle platformer games, physics platformer games, platform games with roguelike elements, and platform games that perfectly jump.
Top 15 Best Platformer Games for PC Gamers In 2022
There’s a true treasure of gems regarding the best platformer games PC. There’s something for everyone on PC, whether you want simple, tough titles that test each of your talents or prefer the rebooted classics you remember from the past. If you’re wary of multiplayer shooters and want to play a classic, we’ve compiled 15 of the best platformer games for PC.
1. Cuphead
Platformer games Cuphead. It’s something we’ve all seen. Some of us have tried over and over to overcome it. A terrific debut in the run and gun genre, with a rubber hose animation that gives the opponents an environment with a lot of personalities.
Players must sprint and leap through the game’s vividly colored levels, leading to themed monster confrontations, such as a big gravestone and a sunflower needing anger management classes. Several power-ups, such as the ability to transform into a plane, can help decrease the difficulty barrier.
2. Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove
Platformer games Shovel Knight, developed by Yacht Club Games, is one of today’s top side-scrolling and platformer games. Because of the game’s popularity, the developers were able to create the gorgeous Treasure Trove collection.
Also, Shovel Knight is included in the Treasure Trove, along with additions such as Plague of Shadows. The goal is to battle your way across the realm in quest of the Knight’s lost love. Numerous villains may cross your path and must be dealt with appropriately. Shovel Knight Showdown, the ‘ultimate battling experience,’ is also available in the Trove.
Shovel Knight is the ideal blend of now and then, combining modern mechanics with side-scrolling stages evocative of the NES period to create an excellent environment for knights to jump around. The soundtrack is also not to be overlooked; frenzied 8-bit beats accompany you on your adventure and add to the overall atmosphere of each level.
3. Inside
Platformer games Inside begins in the same setting as its predecessor, Limbo – the woods, with a tiny boy, in the dark – but quickly moves on to something fresh and strange. Many of the games on this list promote player autonomy, allowing them to jump, swoop, and soar. On the Inside, it’s more or less the polar opposite. This is a creepy horror game with a fast tempo and mood in which your choices have no effect other than to either advance the plot or get you murdered.
That may not be to everyone’s taste, but it illustrates the idea. Whatever you think of Inside’s story, which is up to a lot of interpretation, there’s no denying it’s about control, and you, as the player, are just one of the boy’s controlling influences. Because of the restriction, you’ll be exposed to the kinds of handcrafted moments that platformer games rarely experience: weird sights, one-off mechanics, and horrifying, horrifying animations. When a man pursues you down and trips, his hands gripping your face, it sends shivers down your spine. Inside and Limbo has one thing in common: they both make you watch, even when it gets too much.
4. The Cave
Double Fine is the only firm with two games on this list, yet their two outstanding contributions to the platformer games genre are worlds apart. Whereas Tim Schafer, adventure gaming’s best worldbuilder, supervised the developer’s early titles, Ron Gilbert, point-and-click’s best puzzle designer, helmed The Cave.
Gilbert’s brilliance lies in his ability to create difficulties that reveal something about his characters while still moving the plot forward rather than backward. And the seven main characters in The Cave are all consistently wrong people. Even the more honorable characters in the cast – the Knight, the monk, and the scientist – have dark secrets about how they came to be so powerful.
5. Braid
Braid is a platforming hipster eatery that serves a breakfast that sounds familiar but is served deconstructed. A squat protagonist, green pipes and cannons that fire opponents and a princess in another castle are all featured. On the other hand, those aspects are employed as tools in temporal manipulation problems, while the princess serves as an excuse to ponder the nature of relationships.
You may or may not tolerate purple prose and dudes with floppy hair, but you can’t deny the game’s creativity. Braid is a restless machine for ideas, like every genuinely great platformer. Initially, like in Prince of Persia or Forza, you can only go back in time to repair a mistake. Then, before you know it, you’re speeding up time by degrees or exempting particular objects from the flow of time. Even better, you’re trusted to figure out how to use your new abilities on your own, with the difficulties in front of you nudging you on the correct path.
6. Mark of the Ninja
If you’ve played Klei’s previous game Invisible, Inc., you’ll know he has a penchant for sneaking stealth into unexpected areas. Before making XCOM, the studio created the classic stealth platformer, now available in Remastered form. The blades have become even sharper as a result of the high resolution.
The Mark of the Ninja dries out the 3D immersive sim and boils the juices in the pan, resulting in a diminished but more potent flavor. Suppose you were annoyed by well-thought-out schemes going awry in Dishonored. In that case, you’d find it easier to match your intent here simply because the 2D perspective reduces the number of possibilities. Dropping directly onto someone’s head from a vent becomes much more satisfying. Mark of the Ninja explains, “The beginning of a kill is like embracing a lover.” “Of course, there isn’t a happy ending.”
7. Gunpoint
Gunpoint is a stealth puzzle game Gunpoint stars a freelance detective who behaves like the insect you might find in your rental villa on the first day of your vacation, jumping out of nowhere and clinging to the walls. His hypertrousers are from the Bullfrog brand. It may not make sense, but playing platformer games best suited to the mouse feels fantastic.
The same can be said for Gunpoint’s puzzles, which depict you as a freelance electrician tasked with rewiring the buildings you invade such that, for example, an automatic door triggers the light switch, allowing you to pounce on a guard and hit them six or seven times in the dark. You can always leap out a nearby window if it doesn’t work. It’s encouraged.
8. Grow Home
Before Grow Home, Ubisoft had spent the better part of a decade making traversal as seamless as possible, smoothing over Assassin’s Creed players’ awkward button inputs to sell the appearance of parkour. When Ubisoft Reflections created a prototype for a procedurally animated climber, they recognized the clunky ambulation wouldn’t be appealing. Instead, they embraced the awkwardness and created BUD, a bumbling, glitchy, and utterly endearing robot.
Your goal is to keep climbing and extending a considerable beanstalk, giving oxygen to the small planet you live on. To get started, you must control each hand separately and grab the left and right mouse buttons to move around the terrain. But before you know it, you’re zooming through the air on a leaf-shaped glider. It’s pure joy in motion, and the magic is that it comes from a place of gleeful goofiness instead of something more refined.
9. Spelunky
Yes, Best Platformer Games for PC Gamers Spelunky is a roguelite, but that doesn’t diminish its status as a platformer. There are no XP unlocks or health-related stat increases. Every run starts the same; only finesse will get you further than the last.
The dungeon changes frequently, but familiar components are remixed, allowing you to gain control of the game gradually. Knowing the angle at which a bat departs its perch and how many whips a frog can take before exploding might keep you safe. Alternatively, it could be safer.
10. Super Meat Boy
Nothing has had a more significant impact on PC platforming than Adobe Flash. This browser software allowed indie developers to experiment on a shoestring budget before we knew what that term meant. Ed McMillen, subsequently known for The Binding of Isaac and His Meat Boy, grew up on that rich terrain.
The precision of the sentient steak is his distinctive feature. Meat Boy begins to fall as soon as you let off the jump button. Even if you hit the sprint key while in mid-air, he’ll accelerate instantaneously. This responsiveness comes at the expense of buoyancy, but it allows you to glide over a circular saw obstacle course in a way Mario couldn’t. In a matter of seconds, he’d be spaghetti.
11. Mirror’s Edge
Sonic, which isn’t on this list, is ostensibly a game about speed. However, because you won’t be able to respond in real-time to the obstacles approaching you at rapid speeds at every level, you’ll have to memorize them by rote. Robotnik, soaring above it all in his jet-powered egg cup, has it all figured out.
When I play Mirror’s Edge, I can nearly imagine myself as a Sonic fan. DICE’s first-person platformer makes memorizing routes a point of pride, turning it into a type of composition. Although this zipline appears to be the shortest way off the roof, it ends in a padded landing that slows you down. It’s better to take a detour to a lower level and crash through a stairwell, preserving all of your momentum until the sound of your footfall fades away, leaving just the wind in your ears.
12. N++
I don’t have the data in front of me, but between 2004 and 2008, learning N’s weird physics was the focus of every school lunch break. Another Flash-era treasure, this was a minimalist oddity about navigating a shadow through an abstract array of electric spheres and laser bots to a doorway without upsetting too many of them. N++ is the game’s final form, and it’s a good one.
Like Super Meat Boy, N++ has almost no consequences for failing besides sending you back to the start of the screen. This encourages you to throw yourself around each level and bounce off the grey walls. You only get one shot at getting it right.
13. Celeste
The platformer isn’t afraid to use metaphor or play with themes. It is, for the most part, a genre that should be taken at face value. Celeste, a difficult ascension from the team behind TowerFall, isn’t like that. It stars Madeline, a young woman who has opted to climb a mountain, which is physically and psychologically challenging for her.
Madeline comes to a mirror that presents an ugly reflection of herself shortly after her adventure begins. That nasty self-image never leaves her alone once it escapes its jail.
14. VVVVVV
Captain Viridian’s smile is turned upside down, and he falls into the ceiling instead of the floor. Hence VVVVVV doesn’t have a jump key. While Terry Cavanagh’s opus is far from the only platformer to reverse gravity, it is the best. VVVVVV, like Super Hexagon before it, stripped away the niceties and funneled you through abstract courses where your foes were spikes and forms – or, in one case, only the word ‘LIES’ repeated like Bullet Bills from a speaker.
Cavanagh allows you to focus on the challenge at hand, and just that challenge, by removing any distractions. On impact, death is instantaneous, but quick resets send you back just a few seconds, keeping your muscle memory intact. This little scope allows you to develop in absurdly short periods, overcoming absurd challenges that were unattainable just minutes earlier by every reasonable standard.
15. Psychonauts
It’s not the platformer’s style to world build; 2d platformer games a loose idea and determined expression go a long way in this genre. But everything changed when Tim Schafer got his hands on it. The connecting center zones became a psychic summer camp, with each zone offering a glimpse into the mind of one of the game’s characters. Because brains are the stuff of comedy: home to all our biggest hang-ups and logic short circuits, Double Fine’s oddball humor blossomed here. But the laughter is candy to let the sadness go away because brains are often tragic places as well: blank cubes of repression or continual parties to distract from the terrible secrets concealed behind closed doors.
They got the basics right, which is crucial. After a decade of point-and-click adventure games, it takes guts to take on Nintendo, but the embryonic Double Fine spent a grueling half-decade playtesting Psychonauts. As a result, the nuts and bolts are tight and well-oiled, even if the odd battle feels insignificant. The seeming ease betrays the effort it took to get there, just as it does with Schafer’s writing. It takes sweat and toil to look this effortless. If the first installment left you wanting more, don’t worry: Psychonauts 2 is here to satisfy your hunger.
