I've divided the full list of games into generations or eras here, starting each one with what I'd consider a major release in the genre. Why do this? Well, it's a way of sorting the genre's history into easier to digest parts, and in a way that makes more sense to me since these releases don't necessarily correlate neatly with the console generations (which aren't neatly organized to begin with). 

Games on these and the forerunners page are sorted by year, from oldest to youngest. If you're mainly interested in what to play next, I've sorted the games on each year's page roughly in order of how well I think they've held up and what they did for the genre. There's also this page where I keep some personal top lists sorted by decade. 
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A note regarding genre classifications on these pages: Platform Adventure/Metroidvania is taken as a given. Other genres that a game fits into are mentioned if a significant amount of gameplay aligns with that genre. As a result, a game that is considered more ARPG than PA for example, is listed as a PA game with ARPG mentioned under subgenre rather than being listed in a separate ARPG list and having PA listed after the title. I don't generally classify games by theme, tone, setting or whether they are indie or not (so budget, publisher control and/or team size). 
 

​I've recently added some subcategories to the game entries as well, for easier viewing:​​​​​​

• Subgenre (besides Platform Adventure/MV, includes dimensional info). A subgenres key can be found here. 

• Perspective (SV=side view, TD=top down, FP=first person, TP=third person)

• Movement Mechanics (any out of the ordinary mechanics such as flight and swimming)

• Other (structural variances such as hub maps/areas or overworlds, separate areas, escape sequences, co-op and other alternate modes, time limits, etc.)

 

Below this info is a bullet point list briefly covering features I found relevant when playing and researching the game, such as how non-linear it is, the map system and sequence breaking opportunities. After that, I link to a playthrough video, a review and/or my own mini-review, and finally I make some educated guesses about the game's influence at the bottom of each page. 

If you just want a quick overview of the key Platform Adventure-related features of each game (such as non-linearity, environmental storytelling, world interconnectivity and persistence or dimensions & perspective), check out this spreadsheet. And if you just want a list and nothing else, there's the list format page.
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Note also that the mini-review linked to under each game's entry tends to contain gameplay and story spoilers.