Thankfully, we’ve had no shortage of indie developers eager to jump in and fill the double-jump-boot-shaped hole in our hearts. Metroidvania-inspired platformers rank up there with roguelike (or roguelike-like) procedural games as some of the most popular among aspiring indies. And some of them have been extraordinary — as good as, if not better than, many of the games that inspired them. But which one is best? Let’s make it official.

The ground rules for this list: Indie-published two-dimensional platformers published after Order of Ecclesia (e.g. since Oct. 2008).

As with Shantae’s other adventures, Pirate’s Curse has a brisk, light-hearted feel. The eponymous heroine destroys bad guys with her mighty ponytail and earns new skills. Unlike in the other games, she doesn’t have access to her magical genie powers here; instead of making use of enchanting dances and animal transformations, Shantae instead makes use of pirate tools — which is to say, weapons. The action revolves around guns, swords and even her own disused genie lamp, which gives the game a pleasantly familiar vibe for anyone who’s spent much time dabbling in the metroidvania genre. It makes for a solid take on the genre (that’s a bit heavy on sleazy fanservice at times), and a pretty decent introduction to the basic concepts that underscore the metroidvania genre.

Incredibly, everything in the game world can be manipulated through your tiny bird’s meager abilities. For example: You can stomp to cause a critter to drop from the ceiling; it’s eaten by a larger creature; you can lure the sated monster to a specific point by whistling, then use it as a stepping stone to reach a high platform. The entirety of Toki Tori 2 consists of complex scenes that seem almost completely impossible to solve. But you can! With your lumpy little bird’s tiny selection of abilities! That’s the magic of Toki Tori 2 — it’s deceptively sophisticated. And because it’s an open-ended, exploratory adventure, you can wander off and work on some other challenge when a particular puzzle wrecks your brain.

What really sets Demastered apart is its death mechanic — or maybe better to say its undeath mechanic. Players control a member of a paramilitary team, and when one agent falls, another rappels in to the nearest checkpoint to take the lost fighter’s place.

Creating a game that works as both a white-knuckle NES-style action romp and a more exploratory Super NES-looking metroidvania is surely no easy task, and The Messenger doesn’t always pull it off perfectly. The backtracking can become a bit tiresome, and certain areas of the game work better in one direction than the other. Still, it’s an impressive high-concept feat of game design, made all the better by the fact that it controls so perfectly.

Iconoclasts does a lot with protagonist Robin’s limited skill set, which consists of gigantic versatile wrench and a bomb-tossing stun gun. Each area tends to cluster its puzzles around common themes — flood gates, box-pushing, elevators and so forth — expertly building complexity within a set of challenges before incorporating those skills into all-new challenges. At its most intricate (arguably, in the tower stage), Iconoclasts seems almost impossibly dense, with subtle solutions and stage components that’ll leave you wracking your brain for solutions right up until the moment you figure it out and slap yourself for not seeing such an obvious answer sooner. It helps that the reward for your efforts is inevitably some kind of screen-filling boss battle or cryptic narrative set piece, which keeps the motivation level high.

La-Mulana 2 imitates the form of those games, with tiny characters running around compact environments: Single-screen mini-labyrinths, all interconnected, all packed with monsters and mysteries. What sets this modern work apart from its 8-bit forebears, besides obvious things like superior graphical and musical fidelity, is the way it takes advantage of current technology to make its regimented environments far more interconnected and puzzling than even the classical 8-bit masters managed.

Two features truly define La-Mulana 2: Puzzles and traps. Often, these things appear to be one and the same. Think you’ve solved a puzzle? Oh, you did it wrong and now you’re dead. Don’t assume this is a game about wanton cruelty, though; no, the cruelty you’ll find here is extraordinarily deliberate and polished to a deadly razor’s edge. La-Mulana 2 hurts you, but only because it loves you and wants you to be better.

La-Mulana 2 has many enemies to fight, including some downright terrifying bosses. Really, though, the deadliest foe here is the sheer inadequacy of your brain. Most metroidvanias you beat. La-Mulana 2 you decrypt.

To keep players on their toes even more, Chasm also makes clever use of procedural generation. It’s not a fully randomized, roguelike style adventure, but every time you start a new game the dungeon layout is shuffled. Key progression points and the overall relative location of different dungeon zones always remain consistent, but the routes you take and the mix of enemies you face along the way varies with each new playthrough. In short, the feel of the game makes it a joy to play (even when the going gets tough), while the baked-in variety makes it a pleasure to replay.

Meanwhile, when you do come to the pinball portions of the game, where you fling the egg and its hapless attendant (attend-ant?) around, they’re an absolute delight to play. This isn’t an expert-level pinball sim, so hardcore fans of the silver ball may come away disappointed, but that’s not really the point. Instead, you need to make use of proper flipper technique to open pathways, unlock secrets and rack up currency (fruit, in this case). Yoku’s Island Express tends to be fairly forgiving in general, downplaying combat in favor of exploration and pinball-platforming, but at the same time it also rewards those who have a strong handle on the mechanics and physics of pinball.

By far the most unconventional title on this list, Yoku’s Island Express demonstrates the versatility and broad appeal of the metroidvania concept. And with its unique gameplay, generous design and colorful world, it’s one of the few metroidvania games that’s truly suited for players of all ages.

However, if Guacamelee simply ripped off what was, at the time, a 20-year-old game, it would be a pleasant yet ultimately forgettable experience. DrinkBox may have begun with Super Metroid as its foundation, but you’d certainly never write off Guacamelee as a Metroid clone. The inspiration drawn from Super Metroid informs the broad strokes of the game: The world structure, the interlocking power-ups and mechanics, the fundamental design discipline. Everything else? All original.

From its first appearance, Guacamelee sets itself apart from retro-pixel platformers with a stylish, colorful animated appearance influenced by classical Meso-American art. The overall theme of the game carries forward the vibe of that artwork by taking place in a world based on the Mexican Day of the Dead, featuring characters who fight with luchador moves.

(The recently released sequel, Guacamelee 2, is arguably even better than the original even if it feels less like a revelation. Feel free to put it here in place of the original if you prefer.)

The wicked difficulty isn’t really the point of Hollow Knight, though. What makes this journey so intriguing is how effectively it draws you into its mysterious world. You arrive, alone and poorly armed, in the ruins of what was clearly once a great civilization of insect people, but has fallen into gloom and conflict. Hollow Knight doesn’t send you into this decrepit underground burrow entirely alone — you meet plenty of friendly and helpful characters along the way — but neither does it take any pains to explain the history behind the ruins you roam. Developer Team Cherry clearly put a lot of thought into the world it created and how the play mechanics fit seamlessly into that universe (something that especially shines through in the game’s bosses), but it’s up to you to piece together all the little breadcrumbs you’re given into the full picture.

Of course, you’ll also die a lot along the way.

A big part of what makes Dig 2 so special among metroidvania games is right there in the title: Your primary traversal mechanism involves boring your way through destructible environments. This has nothing to do with coasting on the success of Minecraft, though; there’s no construction element, just hunting for optimal pathways into the depths while trying to avoid the horrible hateful creatures sleeping in the rocks. Dig 2 has the addictive gameplay loop of a great dungeon crawler: You make a little progress, return to town to sell loot and top off consumable resources (light and air), and return to the fray to venture a little further than the last time. It’s slow going at first, but by journey’s end your upgrades allow you to climb, swing, fly and blast your way through the world with impunity.

Dig 2’s central mission (burrow down into the ground as far as you can go!) gives it a clear sense of focus, but all the little excursions and storylines around the edges of the journey to the center of the earth keep it lively and surprising.

Axiom Verge draws heavily on the original Metroid for its overall design style — not Super Metroid, but the stark 8-bit original. Of course, that’s only a starting point; Axiom Verge offers a huge variety of weapons, power-ups and battles that could never have been squeezed into the NES hardware. It applies a great deal of creativity to traversal mechanics with odd and unique powers like short-range warping and the use of remote drones, and the huge arsenal of guns available to protagonist Trace affords players remarkable freedom to customize their combat style.