Upcoming Metroidvania Games in 2026

The big one for 2026 is Hollow Knight: Silksong, which is finally out after years of waiting — but it's far from the only Metroidvania worth your time this year. Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist, Nine Sols, and a time-bending Metroidvania newcomer round out a strong year for the genre. Here's what to play and what to watch.

Hollow Knight: Silksong

The release everyone stopped believing in. After a wait that became a running joke, Silksong is out, and it puts you in control of Hornet instead of the original game's Knight. She moves faster and hits harder, and the early areas ask more of you than Hollow Knight's gentle opening did.

It's the natural starting point if you've been putting off the genre. The world is enormous, the combat has real bite, and it carries forward everything that made the first game the modern benchmark for the best Metroidvania games — hand-drawn areas, hidden routes, bosses you remember by name. You don't need to have finished the original to jump in, though it does add context.

What's worth knowing going in: Hornet isn't a reskin of the Knight. She's quicker, she has her own toolset, and the game is tuned around her movement, so the muscle memory from the first Hollow Knight only half transfers. The early stretch is widely considered tougher than the original's, which is either a warning or a selling point depending on how you felt about the first game's difficulty curve.

Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist

The follow-up to Ender Lilies, and a quieter pick than Silksong but a strong one. Ender Magnolia keeps the melancholy dark-fantasy tone of its predecessor and the same hook: you fight alongside summoned allies called homunculi, each one a separate attack you slot into your kit.

The combat is built around mixing those summons rather than juggling weapons, which gives it a different texture from most of the genre. You build a loadout of attacks from the allies you've recovered and recombine them as fights demand. The world is poisoned and sad in a way the art leans into hard, and the soundtrack does a lot of the emotional work.

If you liked Ender Lilies, this is more of it, refined — and if you didn't play the first one, it still works on its own. It's the kind of game that doesn't try to be the hardest or the biggest; it's after a mood, and it lands it.

Nine Sols

Red Candle Games made the leap from horror into action with Nine Sols, and the result is one of the sharper combat-focused Metroidvanias around. The fighting is deflection-based — closer to Sekiro than to most 2D action games — and the parry timing is the whole point. Get the rhythm and fights feel incredible. Miss it and you'll bounce off hard.

The setting is the other draw. Nine Sols runs on what the studio calls Taopunk: Taoist mythology bolted to science fiction, told through a story that takes itself seriously. It keeps arriving on new platforms, so 2026 is a good year to catch it if you missed the original release.

It's also a useful counterpoint to the rest of this list. Where Silksong and Ender Magnolia lead with exploration, Nine Sols leads with its fights. The map matters, but the moment-to-moment is about reading an enemy and timing the deflect. If you came to the genre for the world-opening and the backtracking more than the combat, it's the entry on this list to approach with that caveat in mind.

One to wishlist: KUTO: The Lock of Time

Full disclosure — this is our own upcoming game, so read the recommendation accordingly. KUTO: The Lock of Time is a single-player time-bending action Metroidvania with a run-based structure, and it's coming soon to Steam Early Access. There's no release date yet; early access means you'll be able to play it while it's still being built out.

You play Jokoan Kuto, an outcast from the Order of the Time Guardians. The gods betray him and leave him for dead, and he survives by merging with the titan Kronos — the bond that arms him with the Scythe of Kronos and command over time itself. His only way out is forward, era by era, while the gods' forces chase him through Ancient Egypt, a falling Rome, the Old West, a neon cyber city, and on into the far future.

The Scythe of Kronos is the constant — a fast, physical, hack-and-slash melee weapon that's always in hand. Around it sits the time-power system, which is where the build variety lives: bullet-time slow, rewind, dash and more, all drawn from the Kronos bond. You carry two per run and swap them between attempts, so the combat reshapes depending on what you bring.

Where it splits from a standard Metroidvania is the run-based loop. You die, you lose the run, you push back in — your progress stays, the run doesn't. That's the trade: the persistent, map-in-your-head feeling of a Metroidvania, run through the repetition and escalation of a run-based structure, with a different era waiting each time you make it far enough. If you want the full picture, here's everything we know about The Lock of Time.

Why this is a Metroidvania with a run-based structure, not a standard Metroidvania

KUTO sits in a specific corner of the genre, and it's worth being precise about it. A standard Metroidvania gives you one persistent world that opens up as you earn abilities. KUTO keeps that ability-gated exploration but wraps it in death and repetition — the same loop Dead Cells made famous, except KUTO's identity is that of a time-bending Metroidvania rather than a roguelike proper.

If that hybrid is what you're actually after, we wrote a whole roundup of the best roguelike Metroidvania games that goes deeper on what the combination does well.

Beyond the headliners

The four above are the ones we'd point a friend toward, but the genre churns out far more than any list can track. Indie studios lean on the Metroidvania format because a small team can build a dense, replayable world without hand-authoring a hundred separate levels, so new entries land constantly. Steam's Metroidvania tag page and the demos that show up during Next Fest are the most reliable places to dig past the marketed releases.

If your taste runs toward the run-based side of things, a lot of the most interesting newcomers blur the line with the roguelike genre. We track those separately in our roundup of upcoming roguelikes for 2026.

How to not miss the smaller releases

The headline games announce themselves. The problem is everything else — the one-person projects and tiny studios that release something special with no marketing behind it. Wishlisting is how you catch those, and it does double duty: Steam's algorithm reads wishlist counts to decide which games to surface, so adding an upcoming game genuinely helps it find players.

If KUTO: The Lock of Time sounds like your kind of thing, the most useful move is to add it now. Wishlist KUTO: The Lock of Time on Steam to follow it toward Early Access and get told the day it's playable.