The dazzling and desirable RPS Advent Calendar 2024
Our favourite games of the year, revealed one a day through December
December is here! It has snuck up on us once again, hidden as it always is behind November's back. It's arrival heralds the beginning of the RPS Advent Calendar 2024, the yearly list of our favourite games of the year. Step inside, open the doors, and celebrate another year's gaming survived.
The advent calendar consists of our 24 favourite games from 2024. Click each of the doors below at noon on each date and it will take you to an article where the members of the RPS team sing a different game's praises. Or at least one RPS staff member will do that while possibly the others slag them off for their taste. The list is, as always, in no particular order - except for December 24th, which is our definitive and objectively correct game of the year.
Just like last year, our advent image this year comes from Gamer Network design wizard Lucy Grimwood. A smiling Horace? Some will call it heresy, but we in the splinter sect believe the endless bear deserves some Christmas cheer. Note: Most of these links won't work until the post goes live on the day in question. We could add the links in manually on each day but history suggests that, no, we cannot, so it's just more efficient to have them all there now.
- Day 1
- Day 2
- Day 3
- Day 4
- Day 5
- Day 6
- Day 7
- Day 8
- Day 9
- Day 10
- Day 11
- Day 12
- Day 13
- Day 14
- Day 15
- Day 16
- Day 17
- Day 18
- Day 19
- Day 20
- Day 21
- Day 22
- Day 23
- Day 24
The rules for our calendar voting are the same as last year:
Any game released this year eligible for inclusion, which also includes games that released into early access, or games that released into 1.0 after an early access period, or remasters or remakes that we consider especially noteworthy. We sometimes allow games from December last year to sneak in, if they came out after voting was finalised, and games that we can make a case for 2024 being their year, even if they didn't come out in 2024. For example, a live service game whose numbers surged suddenly, and old indie game that broke big out of nowhere, or big transformative DLCs would all count.
Voting takes place via everyone on the team writing a list of up to ten favourite games from this year, with the first on the list getting 10 points, the second 9 points, and so on. These lists were collated to make the final advent calendar list, which this year produced a clear winner.
The RPS calendar appeared in 2007, and basically every year since: 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. In 2014 we did the RPS Bestest Bests which were the exact same only it wasn't based around a calendar. We went back to the calendar format for 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. That makes this the eighteenth RPS advent calendar, if you count the freak years (2008 and 2014).