Gaming: Upcoming Best Platformers On PC
The very best 2D and 3D jumping across decades of PC gaming.
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.
Oh yeah, and don't expect to see any metroidvania games like the oft-celebrated Silksong or, well, Castlevania here. We already covered those!
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 st
Source: PC Gamer
