10 Metroidvanias That Make Every New Movement Ability Feel Like Opening a New Game

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Published Jul 14, 2026, 3:05 PM EDT

Daniel Trock is a Contributor at DualShockers specializing in PC games, lists, and reviews. He has been writing professionally since 2018 and covering games since 2020, with previous work spanning guides, news, lists, and reviews across multiple publications.

Before joining DualShockers, Daniel contributed guides to GamerJournalist and lists to TheGamer. He currently covers tech topics for SlashGear and BGR. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Marist College and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative and Professional Writing from Western Connecticut State University.

One of the crucial cornerstones that makes the Metroidvania genre so fun and engaging is movement abilities. Exploration makes up the lion’s share of the typical Metroidvania experience, and new and improved movement abilities make that exploration more fun and interesting, not to mention faster and more seamless. Unlocking new abilities like dashes and double jumps is par for the course, of course, but some Metroidvania games know how to pump the gas a little.

Some games in this genre, including some of the absolute best ones, know that the moment you unlock a new movement ability should feel absolutely monumental. It’s the moment a massive swath of the map, previously inaccessible and unknown, has just become fully available to you and is ripe for exploring. It’s the moment you can deftly weave your way through passages you’ve already traversed with a new level of speed and precision, where doing so before was slow and cumbersome. It’s almost like one game has ended and another, even better one has begun.

Gameplay spoilers for all the following games!

10 Aeterna Noctis

Point and Shoot

For the most part, Aeterna Noctis is pretty average in its swath of movement abilities unlocked over the course of the critical path. You’ve got your double jump, your air glide, your wall climb, and all that other good stuff, but nothing particularly monumental. However, there is one late-game ability that turns the entire thing completely on its head: the Crystal Arrows.

The King can fire several types of arrows from his bow, but the first couple are just for offensive purposes and hitting switches. The Crystal Arrows, however, have a wholly unique ability, one I don’t think I’ve seen in many other Metroidvanias before. Wherever the arrow lands after you fire it, you can instantly teleport right next to it. In this way, you can instantly reach high spots and slip through narrow gaps. Anywhere your shots can reach, you can reach, and this ability opens up the map exponentially.

9 Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

Space is Warped and Time is Bendable

Since Sands of Time largely reestablished the franchise’s identity, the Prince of Persia games have had a fairly consistent emphasis on time and space manipulation, and other similar abilities. Naturally, that kind of theming ties well into a Metroidvania format, given the genre’s penchant for obtuse environmental puzzles, and that’s what also informs the abilities you unlock in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

Rather than the baseline time-rewinding shtick you see in a lot of Prince of Persia games, Lost Crown’s movement abilities mixes things up a bit. You start simple with an air dash, but quickly move up to a recall ability that lets you warp back to a set spot, a dimension-flipping ability that allows you to see multiple sides of a single locale, and an old favorite, a grappling hook that can be used to both pull stuff down and pull yourself upwards. Sargon is a pretty agile protagonist from the very start of the game, so combining his natural athleticism with these particular abilities allows him to navigate with an impressive fluidity and finesse that gradually speeds the game up as you go.

8 Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse

A Whole Pirate’s Arsenal

In the first two Shantae games, Shantae is reliant on her dancing transformations to use her various traversal abilities. You turn into a monkey to climb stuff, a harpy to fly, and so forth. It was kind of inconvenient, as you had to constantly flip between forms to use different movesets, at least unless you went to the trouble of unlocking the multifunctional Tinkerbat form. By comparison, Pirate’s Curse’s upgrades are much more seamless, and that’s on top of generally making Shantae more mobile.

Each piece of Risky’s pirate gear unlocks a new ability for Shantae, and aside from the starting pistol, they all have some manner of movement-enhancing benefit. The hat lets you glide, the scimitar lets you down-thrust, and the boots let you dash, though the most freeing ability out of all of them definitely comes from the cannon. Rather than a traditional projectile, the cannon is used in the air, allowing you to jump up to three times after your initial leap for a quadruple jump. With the cannon, virtually nothing is out of your reach, vertically or horizontally, and it attacks enemies right below you to boot.

7 Axiom Verge

Decoding Reality

Metroidvania games have long gone hand-in-hand with sequence-breaking and speedrunning. There’s just something about a massive, meticulously-designed labyrinth that just makes you want to break it down and bend it to your will. Axiom Verge channels some of that energy into its core design, with several of its movement upgrades meant to subvert the boundaries of the map entirely.

While the majority of the upgrades Trace obtains for the Axiom Disruptor are offensive in nature, some of the most interesting ones are related to his secondary equipment, chiefly his coat and the unlockable Remote Drone. The coat can be upgraded several times; at first, it allows you to phase through thin walls by walking into them, but with subsequent upgrades, it can both be activated at will for a short-range blink and phase through even thicker walls both above and below you. The Remote Drone, meanwhile, can be upgraded with a teleportation function, which allows Trace to warp wherever the Drone goes.

6 Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist

Homunculi for Hire

Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist

Compared to the somewhat frail Lily, Ender Magnolia’s Lilac is a more physically capable protagonist, despite also being a child. She can sprint and dodge right off the bat, and once she gets her mantle, she can perform enchanted air dodges. All that said, she still can’t do much on her own, which is where her various recruited Homunculi pick up the slack.

Every time you defeat a major boss and recruit them to your cause, you unlock their corresponding movement ability, or upgrade one of the Homunculi you already have with you. Hati only serves as your means of fast travel at first, but with Hati’s Charge unlocked, he can dash at high speed along the ground, breaking walls and damaging enemies. Or, when you recruit Lars, he can only grip walls at first, but with an upgrade, he can dash horizontally unlimited distances, flying off walls to far-off platforms. In this way, not only does Lilac become much more capable, but you come to appreciate your Homunculi buddies a little more.

5 Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Shapeshifting for Dummies

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Despite being one of the progenitors of the Metroidvania genre, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night doesn’t actually put as much emphasis on movement abilities and upgrades as its modern contemporaries. It was more focused on its equipment and stat-building elements, plus just smashing walls in search of secrets in the traditional Castlevania fashion. What few movement abilities it did have, though, still made a pretty big impression.

Alucard’s most interesting abilities are his shapeshifting powers, a little hand-me-down from his father. By obtaining the relevant upgrades, he can transform into a wolf, a bat, and a cloud of mist. Each of these forms have their own use cases, though the most game-changing one, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the bat. Not only can you fly in bat form, but with the help of the Wing Smash upgrade, you can dash through any unobstructed space at ridiculously high speeds, which makes exploring the castle so much easier and faster than before.

4 Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Stick a Shard in Your Tummy, Get a Prize

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

As Bloodstained was created by the same guy who created Symphony of the Night, it naturally inherits many of its design sensibilities, though it also takes its own steps to be more in line with the modern Metroidvania vibe. Case in point, while there aren’t that many movement abilities to unlock (or obtain from random enemy drops in some cases), the ones you do get can have pretty monumental effects on your ability to navigate.

Bloodstained’s movement abilities run the gamut of mundane and wild, starting simple with extra jumps and better water exploration, then moving up to super-speed dashes that let you charge through corridors like nobody’s business. The moment when the game really opens up, likely in homage to the Inverted Castle of Symphony of the Night, is when you receive the Invert ability, which lets you flip the effects of gravity on Miriam alone. Rather than flying, this ability lets you effectively “fall up,” as well as perform a sort of pseudo-infinite jump by repeatedly flipping your orientation.

3 Super Metroid

Everyone Loves a Shinespark

You know why Metroid is still considered a hallmark Nintendo series, despite not having as many games as other Nintendo IPs? Because nobody gets things done like Samus Aran, in or out of the Metroidvania genre. Everyone likes playing as Samus because she’s immensely capable, not just in how well she uses that arm cannon of hers, but in how effortlessly she makes navigating cramped, hazardous caverns look. There’s a reason she stole all our hearts in Super Metroid: she’s got the moves.

As another bedrock Metroidvania game, Super Metroid’s movement abilities have set the standard for what needs to be included in any other game of the genre, including better jumps and squeezing into tight spaces with the Morph Ball. One of the game’s most legendary upgrades, though, is the Speed Booster, as well as the Shinespark ability that comes with it. Not only does the Speed Booster shave your general transit time down considerably, but the Shinespark is the cornerstone of the Metroid speedrunning community, as its ability to launch you in any direction in a straight line has uncovered more than a few sequence breaks.

2 Animal Well

You Can’t Do Much on Your Own Anyway

In most Metroidvania games, your protagonist starts with at least a base level of movement competence. They can run, they can jump, and maybe they can do a little dodge roll or something. Of course, in most Metroidvania games, you play as a protagonist with four functioning limbs, which is four more than the little blob you play as in Animal Well has.

At the start of Animal Well, you are basically incapable of doing anything besides walking and hopping along the ground. Rather than traditional character upgrades, your movement abilities are unlocked via discovered tools, each of which have a distinct use case. The Bubble Wand lets you make small, temporary footholds, the Wheel lets you roll over hazardous terrain, and the Disc can be thrown and ridden short distances. On their own, these abilities aren’t monumental, but they become a much bigger deal when you compare your utter inability to do much of anything before you had them, and especially in how much easier they make backtracking.

1 Hollow Knight: Silksong

One Thread of Silk

When I first fought Hornet in the original Hollow Knight, I immediately got the sense that this character was far more capable than me, not to mention far more mobile and agile. That’s part of why people were willing to wait so long to play Silksong, because we all wanted the chance to play as Hornet ourselves and experience just how agile she is. She’s not quite all that and a bag of chips at the start of the game, but she gets back into top form soon enough with a combination of upgrades and new Crests.

Hornet unlocks some similar abilities to the Knight, including a double jump, wall hanging, and so forth, but in addition to that, she receives several wholly unique abilities, like a glide and a super vertical jump. Her most distinctive upgrade is the Clawline, which allows her to grapple to hanging rings as well as hook onto enemies and pull herself in. In addition to the base upgrades, Hornet’s movement and combat styles also change drastically with each different Crest you equip. You might not find the one that clicks for you right away, but trust me, once you find the Crest that meshes with your playstyle, it feels like a whole new ballgame.

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