The PlayStation Vita is something of an oddity—a pricy, powerful portable gaming console adrift in a sea of smartphones, touchscreen controls, and inexpensive app-store games. All the same, we have a fondness for Sony’s beefy handheld, and the many unusual games you can play on it.
The Vita gives us a handheld machine with sticks, touch panels, lots of buttons, lots of online features and, oh yeah, graphical horsepower like we’ve never seen before in a gaming handheld. It lets you stream PS4 games remotely, which can actually work really well under the right circumstances. It also allows you to download and play select PSP games, the best of which sit comfortably next to their higher-resolution Vita brothers and sisters.
So, what must you play on this thing? Start with these games.
Making brilliant use of this portable platform and busting with imagination, Tearaway is a Vita dream come true. At its most basic, the game is a basic 3D platformer set in a world that appears to be made of construction paper. The trick is that the people of this world appear to be aware of you. They can see you, thanks to the Vita’s front-facing camera streaming a feed of your face into their world as their sun. They can feel the impact of your fingers as your forefinger and middle finger can tap the rear of the system to poke through their terrain.
A Good Match For: Fans of development studio Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet games and fans of Instagram.
Not a Good Match For: Grumpy people who don’t like cute stuff.
Read our review.
Watch it in action.
Purchase From: Amazon | Wal-Mart | Best Buy | Gamestop
Gravity Rush is a delight, an open-world adventure game built around a truly new-feeling mechanic. The protagonist Kat is able to re-orient gravity, letting her fall in any direction. It’s something of a mix between falling and flying, and it makes the game a uniquely disorienting, highly enjoyable experience. Combine those mechanical smarts with a wonderfully imaginative, fun story, lush visuals, gorgeous art design and a dizzy, grand soundtrack and you’ve got a real winner.
A Good Match For: Crackdown and Infamous fans, people who like their games to look and play differently, jazz-heads.
Not a Good Match For: Those who want familiar mechanics, deep and involved combat.
Read our review.
Watch it in action.
Purchase from the PlayStation Store
“Waiter, I’d like a large order of high school drama with a side... of murder.” That’s Danganronpa for you, a high school social simulator/murder mystery that combines elements of Phoenix Wright, Clue, Persona and Battle Royale into a pulpy stew of bloody entertainment. This is the first time we’ve collapsed two games into a single entry on The Bests, but considering that both games, Trigger Happy Havoc and Goodbye Despair came out in the same year and tell two halves of a complete story, we feel okay about it. Monokuma agrees. Puhuhu…
A Good Match For: Anyone looking for a fun story to occupy their time for the next 30-40 hours, anyone who likes the games/movies/manga listed in the description above.
Not A Good Match For: Anyone looking for challenging gameplay—both games feature weird minigames that take place at various points in the story, but they’re mostly just linear visual novels that you slowly work your way through.
Read our reviews of the first and second games.
Watch it in action.
Purchase From: Available Digitally From The PlayStation Store
You’ll have to embrace verbosity to really enjoy Trails of Cold Steel, a game that’s best described as “Suikoden meets Persona.” That’s what makes it so special, though. Cold Steel has just about everything you’d want from a turn-based RPG: a fun, twisty story, strategy-heavy combat, great environments, well-written dialogue, and characters who start off feeling stereotypical but show all sorts of other dimensions as the game goes on. It’s a slow burn, yes, and some of the quests can feel tedious, but the payoffs are well worth all the setup.
A Good Match For: Anyone who wants to spend dozens of hours enthralled in a complicated world filled with interesting people, politics, and relationships.
Not A Good Match For: Impatient people. People who don’t like reading.
Read our thoughts on the game.
Watch it in action.
Purchase From: Amazon | Wal-Mart | Best Buy | Gamestop
Combining the PlayStation 3’s PixelJunk Shooter and PixelJunk Shooter 2, PJS Ultimate is a two-in-one pack of well-designed, great-looking and great-sounding 2D flying/shooting/rescuing games. You control a little craft that you fly through a series of caverns. Each area contains some people to rescue (use your grappling hook), creatures to kill (use your guns), gems to find (use your brain) and, coolest of all, some sort of incredibly-animated liquid: lava, water and weirder stuff. The fluids are the stars of the game, as they realistically splash, flow, deform, melt, and cool in ways that aren’t just special to see but affect gameplay. Both games were created by Q-Games, a Kyoto-based studio that use the Shooter games to demonstrate their mastery of tight, clever level design, one cavern at a time.
A Good Match For: People looking for something hand-crafted and focused, a break from modern gaming’s indulgence in open worlds or randomly-generated levels.
Not a Good Match For: Those looking for a Vita original (you might have this on PS3) nor for those looking for a more rapid-fire shoot-em-up, which this is not.
Watch it in action.
Purchase From: Available digitally from the PlayStation store.
It should not feel this cool to brutally murder people, but that may well be Hotline Miami’s entire point. The top-down killfest would be fun with the sound turned off, but the astoundingly good soundtrack elevates things to a different, more disturbingly stylish level.
The game made a big splash on PC, and for a while, mouse-control seemed like the only worthwhile fit for its brand of extremely fast, unforgiving action. But Hotline Miami works surprisingly well with the Vita’s controls, thanks in part to the ability to tag enemies for locked-on shots, which lets you plan each room-assault with a bit more precision. Groovy, disturbing, disgusting, and worryingly satisfying, Hotline Miami is one of the Vita’s most potent, darkly enjoyable games.
A Good Match For: Fans of exploitation cinema, old-school twitchy action fans, perfectionists, sociopaths.
Not A Good Match For: The weak-stomached, those who don’t like violence, people who want a forgiving game and/or hate electronic music.
Watch it in action.
Purchase from: PlayStation Store | Wal-Mart
Possibly the best modern roguelike around, Spelunky is a platformer where you take a whip, a lasso, bombs, and whatever you find along the way in an attempt to go as deep as possible into randomly-generated ancient caves. The reason? Treasure, of course. Think of yourself as a cute version of Indiana Jones. While the game has appeared on other platforms, it feels at home on the Vita—Spelunky is devilishly hard and holds many secrets about the way its world and creatures work. Players can expect to die countless times as they learn how to get around. One run might last 30 seconds, the next might last 15 minutes, and both might be completely different from one other—you’ll play in bursts, which is perfect for on-the-go gaming. With its randomly generated levels and new daily challenges, Spelunky is a game that will likely stay on your Vita for a good long while to come.
A Good Match For: Anyway with tenacity and a sense of wonder. The game is difficult, but it’s also fascinating—there are a ton of rules and mysteries to uncover, which is compounded by the fact that most of the game is procedurally generated.
Not a Good Match For: Players looking for a relaxed experience: Spelunky demands that you learn how to play well, else you’re not going to get very far.
Read our review.
Watch it in action.
Purchase From: Available digitally from the PlayStation Store
Japanese high school never seemed so much fun. Persona 4 Golden, a remake of the critically-acclaimed PlayStation 2 role-playing game, combines a social simulator and a hardcore RPG with surprisingly addictive results. Take midterms in the morning, eat steak with your girlfriend on the roof for lunch, then head to the mall after school to fight off shadow monsters in a dangerous world that exists inside televisions. Just another day in Persona 4’s Japan.
A Good Match For: RPG fans who want something different than the standard fantasy or sci-fi fare, or Persona fans looking for a good excuse to replay the fourth one.
Not a Good Match For: Something short. Persona 4 Golden will take you something like 70-80 hours to beat—and that’s before you start New Game Plus.
Read our review.
Watch it in action.
Purchase From: Amazon | Best Buy | GameStop | PlayStation Store
Virtue’s Last Reward is a visual novel—in other words, it’s mostly text—but don’t hold that against it. As you weave through the game’s narrative branches, you’ll do some things you could only do in a video game, and you’ll discover a story that could only be told in a video game. The hook: Nine people are trapped in a facility where they’re forced to participate in a twisted version of the prisoner’s dilemma, and... well, the less I tell you, the better.
A Good Match For: Anyone who likes good stories—particularly grisly ones.
Not a Good Match For: People who don’t like to read, or can’t stand anime-ish characters and voices.
Read our thoughts.
Watch it in action.
Purchase From: Amazon | Best Buy | Gamestop
Maybe you played through Final Fantasy X and X-2 back in the day and want to relive them. Or maybe you’ve never played them. Either way, the remastered versions of both games find a fine new home on the Vita. They’re perfect for on-the-go play, and given both games’ generous lengths should keep you occupied on commutes for months to come. And is there a better way to experience FFX’s endearingly awful voice acting than while wearing headphones on the bus? There is not.
A Good Match For: JRPG fans, Final Fantasy fans, Blitzball fans. (We’re not sure that last type of person exists.)
Not A Good Match For: JRPG haters, Final Fantasy haters.
Read our impressions of the new version.
Watch it in action.
Purchase From: Amazon | Wal-Mart | Best Buy | Gamestop
One might be tempted to describe Dragon Quest Builders as “the Dragon Quest version of Minecraft.” That’s an okay starting point, but the comparison ultimately fails to do this game justice. DBQ starts out by following Minecraft’s example, giving you a world completely made of crafting parts and letting you dismantle and rebuild it as you see fit. But it also notably changes the structure by framing everything within an actual narrative, introducing townspeople who send you on specific quests, and generally giving players much more structure to guide them along their way. Dragon Quest Builders is a fantastic game to play on the go, and a natural fit for the Vita.
Read our impressions of the game.
Watch it in action.
Purchase From: Available digitally on the PlayStation store.
Something is wrong with Isaac’s mom: She thinks that she can hear God. And God, disturbingly enough, has instructed her to kill Isaac. The only way Isaac can get out of that hellish situation is by jumping into his basement—which happens to be endless, and full of terrors. Thankfully, these demons can be defeated by directing Isaac’s tears, twin-stick shooter style, across Zelda-like dungeons. Well.. they’re like Zelda if Zelda was full of horrifying hellspawn, poop, and tons of mysterious items which you don’t know how to use...yet.
A Good Match For: Players who like a challenge, especially of the roguelike variety. A lot of the appeal with the Binding of Isaac is that it’s full of stuff you don’t grok the first time around.
Not A Good Match For: Players who are sensitive to gross stuff or jokes about religion, or people who are just looking to relax while playing a game.
Watch it in action.
Purchase From: Available digitally from the PlayStation store.
How has this list changed? Read back through our update history:
Update 12/21/2016: We’ve added Dragon Quest Builders and removed Thomas Was Alone.
Update 4/13/2016: Rymdkapsel comes off the list and Trails of Cold Steel takes its place. We’ve also added video.
Update 11/26/2014: The Vita list gets a much needed update. We’ve cleared out LittleBigPlanet Vita, Super Stardust Delta, OlliOlli and Sound Shapes to make room for newcomers Final Fantasy X/X-2, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate, and Danganronpa 1&2.
Update 3-5-2014: We’ve wrestled with a number of good recent Vita games, but only one has made it all the way to the list: The rail-grinding OlliOlli, which bumps off Assassin’s Creed: Liberation.
Update 12-10-13: With a new design overhaul for The Bests come a few new games: Need For Speed: Most Wanted, Rayman: Origins and FIFA Soccer leave to make room for Tearaway, Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward and Spelunky.
Update 8-21-2013: Vita price drop officially announced! Sony dropped the news at Gamescom yesterday, to the welcoming arms and ears of probably many gamers. If you were waiting for just this kind of news to hit before making your handheld hardware purchase, now is the time to check out what games you’ll want to get started with. We’ve made a few adjustments in light of the recent events, swapping in Hotline Miami, Rymdkapsel and Thomas Was Alone in place of Hot Shots Golf, Lumines and Where Is My Heart. Take a look at our new list below.
Update 11-12-2012: The quality of titles available for Sony’s handheld keeps getting better so we’re refreshing the list of what we think are the best games for the PlayStation Vita. New to the Bests for Vita are: Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, Need for Speed Most Wanted and Persona 4 Golden. Games that fell off the list include Mutant Blobs Attack, Wipeout 2048 and Escape Plan. They’re still good but their replacements are just a wee bit more impressive.
Want more of the best games on each system? Check out our complete directory:
The Best PC Games • The Best PS4 Games • The Best Xbox One Games • The Best Nintendo Switch Games • The Best Wii U Games • The Best 3DS Games • The Best PS Vita Games • The Best Xbox 360 Games • The Best PS3 Games • The Best Wii Games • The Best iPhone Games • The Best iPad Games • The Best Android Games • The Best PSP Games • The Best Facebook Games • The Best DS Games • The Best Mac Games • The Best Browser Games • The Best PC Mods
Note: While some games on this list are download-only, all of them can be purchased on the Vita’s online store. If you buy any of these games through the retail links in this post, our parent company may get a small share of the sale through the retailers’ affiliates program.