The best platformer games like Crash Bandicoot are Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy, Crash Bandicoot 4 and Spyro the Dragon. Below are 9, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to platformer costs you.
Filtering to platformer means you want the movement itself to be the pleasure. It is the right filter when the thing you liked was getting from one place to another.
What you get: A game you can judge in ten seconds. Platformers live or die on the jump, and a good one feels right before anything else happens.
What made Crash Bandicoot worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the platformer part of that answer, and only the platformer part.
All three rebuilt, and the definitive way to play them.
The modern sequel, and genuinely one of the hardest platformers made.
The sister series, and the gentle one.
A modern mascot platformer in the same register.
The other precision mascot platformer, and one of the best ever made.
If the precision rather than the mascot is what you liked.
The most polished 2D platformer since.
Small, kind, and made for the same audience.
A small game entirely about how good it feels to move.
Weight. Platformers rarely carry a story you will think about afterwards, and the collectible-led ones can become checklists if you let them.
The full list is on games like Crash Bandicoot — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy. All three rebuilt, and the definitive way to play them.
No. Crash Bandicoot released on the PlayStation, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Whether the move set is complete early. The great ones give you everything in the first level and spend the rest asking better questions of it; the weak ones drip-feed abilities to disguise thin level design.
Different games. 2D platformers are about precision on a single screen; 3D ones are about reading space and camera. Each pick below says which it is.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Crash Bandicoot list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is platformer — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the platformer guide for where to start in the genre generally.