Every "best PS1 platformer" list ends up in the same place: Crash, Spyro, Rayman, Symphony of the Night. Those games earned their reputations, and we cover them in our top 5 best platformers on the PlayStation 1. This is the other list — five platformers that reviewers liked, that shoppers walked straight past, and that are far easier to play now than they were to find in 1998.
1. Klonoa: Door to Phantomile
Namco's Klonoa is the clearest case of a great platformer that nobody bought. It runs on a 2.5D design: the levels are built in 3D and the camera swings around them freely, but Klonoa himself moves along a fixed path, so the depth is scenery and framing rather than something you have to fight. The hook is the Wind Bullet, which inflates an enemy into a grabbable balloon. From there you can throw it at another enemy, or throw it downward to launch yourself into a second jump — so most of the platforming is really a puzzle about which enemy to pick up and where to spend it.
It also commits hard to its own world. The cutscenes are voiced in an invented language rather than English, and the story turns considerably darker than the round-eared mascot on the box suggests. Sales were poor enough that the game became a cult reference point instead of a franchise; the 2022 Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series remaster is the reason most people have finally played it.
2. Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness is what happens when a cinematic platformer gets an enormous budget and about five years of development. It came from Amazing Studio, founded by Eric Chahi after Another World, and the family resemblance is immediate: a small vulnerable protagonist, deliberate momentum, and death as a normal part of learning a screen.
You play Andy, a boy who follows his dog into a shadow world armed with a plasma weapon and, later, the ability to grow tendrils from the ground. The pre-rendered cutscenes were a genuine showpiece at the time and still hold their shape. The catch is the same one every cinematic platformer carries — you will die a lot, often to a hazard you could not have known about, and the game answers with a library of elaborate, gruesome death animations. Play it for the atmosphere and the pacing, not for forgiving checkpoints.
3. Skullmonkeys
Skullmonkeys is the PlayStation sequel to The Neverhood, and like its predecessor everything on screen was built from physical clay and photographed frame by frame. Where The Neverhood was a point-and-click adventure, this one straps Klaymen into a straightforward 2D side-scroller — run, jump, land on things, collect the odd power-up with a name too silly to print here.
The mechanics are conventional and the difficulty is uneven. What makes it worth a slot is that nothing else looks or sounds like it. Terry Scott Taylor's soundtrack is the game's most famous artefact, wandering from surf rock to lounge to a song that exists purely to explain a bonus level. It is the kind of game that never had a real audience and picked one up two decades later.
4. Tomba! 2: The Evil Swine Return
The original Tomba! has become well enough known that we gave it its own write-up. The sequel has not had the same luck, largely because its print run was tiny and physical copies have been expensive for years.
Tomba! 2 moves the series to 3D models on a mostly 2.5D plane and keeps the structure that made the first game unusual: it is a platformer organised as a quest log. You accept over a hundred events, and progress comes from noticing that an item three areas back solves a problem in front of you. That makes it much closer to an adventure game than to Crash Bandicoot, and it is the reason the game rewards a notebook. The trade-off is real — backtracking is constant, and if you dislike hunting for the one NPC who moved, this is not the sequel to start with.
5. Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee
Abe's Oddysee is the best known game here, which is exactly why it belongs on an underrated list rather than a best-of one: it is remembered as an art style far more often than it is actually played. Abe is a floor-scrubber at a meat processing plant who learns that his species is next on the menu, and he escapes with no weapons whatsoever.
Everything runs on two systems. GameSpeak lets you talk to other Mudokons with a handful of button-mapped phrases — hello, follow me, wait — which is how you shepherd them to safety. Possession lets Abe chant his way into a Slig guard's body and turn the level's own security against it. Almost everything kills you in one hit, so screens are memorised rather than improvised. There are 99 Mudokons to rescue and the ending you get depends on how many you saved, which turns an already careful game into a deliberately slow one.
Where to start
Take Klonoa first if you want a platformer in the traditional sense — it is the most immediately playable game on this list and the least likely to frustrate. Take Abe's Oddysee or Heart of Darkness if you want atmosphere and are willing to trade lives for it, and Tomba! 2 if the idea of a platformer with a quest log sounds like a feature rather than a warning.
All five are 1997–2000 PlayStation titles, which puts them among the least demanding things you can ask a modern retro handheld to run; compatibility is generally a question of the specific emulator build rather than raw power, so it is worth checking per-game notes for whichever device you own. If you want more of the console's overlooked catalogue beyond the platforming genre, our PS1 hidden gems list picks up where this one stops.
