Hollow Knight: Silksong
Seven years after it was announced, Team Cherry's sequel arrives faster, meaner and bigger than the original, and mostly earns every one of those seven years.
9 / 10
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Platformer reviews
16 Platformer games reviewed and scored, best first.
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16 reviews
N
A ninja falls, slides and wall-jumps through a wireframe apartment building full of homicidal robots, in the 2004 freeware download that taught a generation of Flash developers what momentum-based platforming could feel like — years before N+ or N++ existed.
8 / 10
Happy Wheels
A ragdoll physics playground where the violence is the punchline — Jim Bonacci's free browser game turned decapitation into slapstick, built its longevity on a level editor that outgrew the base game by orders of magnitude, and outlived Flash itself through a 2020 rewrite most of its contemporaries never got.
7.5 / 10
Loved
A ten-minute Flash platformer from 2010 that opens by telling you your gender is wrong, then spends the rest of its length making you choose between a narrator's approval and your own defiance — and rigs the controls so that choice never feels comfortable either way.
7.5 / 10
The Company of Myself
A free 2009 Newgrounds puzzle platformer where you solve rooms by recording and replaying your own past movements, wrapped around a hermit's confession that turns the clone mechanic into the point of the story rather than a gimmick bolted onto it.
7.5 / 10
The Fancy Pants Adventures: World 1
A three-level, stick-figure platformer that Brad Borne built alone in Flash and put up on Newgrounds on 14 March 2006 — and the one Flash game whose momentum-and-wall-jump movement was good enough to get itself remade twice, once by EA on consoles and once by its own creator on Steam, nearly two decades later.
7.5 / 10
This Is the Only Level
John Cooney's 2009 one-room platformer spends thirty stages breaking its own single layout — reversing the controls, killing the lights, handing movement to the mouse — and it is still turning up on "best Flash games" lists in 2026 for exactly that trick, even though the trick itself only works once.
7.5 / 10
Transformice
A three-week Flash prototype about mice, cheese and a randomly chosen "shaman" who builds the level around them went viral through 4chan and SomethingAwful in 2010 and never actually died — Atelier 801 kept it alive as its own live service for sixteen years while almost everything else in this archive stopped running.
7.5 / 10
Achievement Unlocked
A four-day joke about achievement bloat, built by Armor Games' first employee, that turned "do 100 arbitrary things to a blue elephant in one room" into a bigger hit than anything with actual level design that Armor Games shipped that month — and that got a real Steam re-release with real achievements fifteen years later, which is funnier than anything in the original script.
7 / 10
Karoshi Suicide Salaryman
A Flash puzzle-platformer where every spike, saw and falling safe is the goal instead of the hazard, built by Jesse Venbrux as the third entry in a franchise that started life as freeware on Windows a few months earlier — which means half of what looks like a fresh idea here is the series repeating its best tricks for a bigger portal audience.
7 / 10
Portal: The Flash Version
Two Israeli teenagers spent months translating a game they hadn't played into 2D, working only from Half-Life 2 and Orange Box trailer footage, and shipped it on Newgrounds a single day before Valve's own Portal reached shelves — then watched Valve fold 14 of its levels into an official Xbox 360 re-release two years later.
7 / 10
Raze
A 2010 Armor Games shooter that bolts an FPS-style mouse-aim-and-credit-shop loop onto 2D platform movement, then tells its story twice — once as the human resistance, once as the alien invasion it's putting down — an unusually structured idea that a repetitive, mirrored second campaign doesn't fully live up to.
7 / 10
Strike Force Heroes
A two-person studio's Call of Duty-meets-Team Fortress 2 pitch for a browser shooter — four classes, killstreaks and a fully voiced campaign, undercut by a slot-machine unlock system that retrospective coverage still calls out as the weak link.
7 / 10
Zombotron
A 2011 Armor Games physics platformer that blends destructible-environment puzzling with a zombie shooter — praised on release for its atmosphere and inventive kills, marked down even then for controls contemporary reviewers described as sluggish and floaty.
7 / 10
Meat Boy
A three-week Newgrounds precision platformer from October 2008, built by one artist and one first-time Flash programmer, that quietly became the prototype for Super Meat Boy — and is worth judging on its own, rougher terms rather than as a footnote to the console game it grew into.
6.5 / 10
Mario Combat
A three-minute Newgrounds combo brawler from November 2008 that swaps Mario's jump-stomps for a fighting-game input scheme, wins on the strength of that one idea, and has nothing else to offer once the novelty of hitting Bowser wears off.
6 / 10