The PlayStation was never a platformer machine. There are 4 here worth knowing — Castlevania Symphony of the Night, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon among them — and if the genre is what you are after, another console is the better answer.
The console that made 3D normal and made discs mandatory. Full soundtracks, voice acting and pre-rendered backdrops gave a generation of studios room to invent genres we still play.
This is not one of its strengths. Precision. Early 3D controls, wobbling textures and a camera that nobody had solved yet make a lot of this library harder to return to than the 2D generation before it.
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.
Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.
Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.
Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.
Follow the link for hand-written recommendations if you want more like it.
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.
Weight. Platformers rarely carry a story you will think about afterwards, and the collectible-led ones can become checklists if you let them.
Saying a console is weak at something is more useful than padding a list. If platformer is what you actually want, these machines are built for it:
Castlevania Symphony of the Night is the usual first answer, and there are 4 in the library we cover.
Not especially. The NES, SNES, N64 are better answers for this genre.
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.
From the games this site covers on the PlayStation, matched against hand-mapped gameplay categories rather than a storefront's genre tag. A page only exists where there are at least four, which is why some console and genre combinations have no page at all.
Or browse the whole PlayStation library.