December is here! It snuck up on us once again, hiding behind November’s back as always. Its arrival signals the start of the 2024 RPS Advent Calendar, the annual list of our favorite games of the year. Come in, open the doors and celebrate another year of gaming.

The Advent calendar consists of our 24 favorite games from 2024. Click on the doors below at 12 p.m. each day and you will be taken to an article in which the RPS team members sing the praises of a different game. Or at least one RPS employee will, while the others may screw them over their taste. As always, the list is in no particular order – with the exception of December 24th, which is our definitive and objectively correct Game of the Year.

Like last year, our Advent picture this year comes from Gamer Network design expert Lucy Grimwood. A smiling Horace? Some will call it heresy, but we in the splinter sect believe that the Endless Bear deserves some Christmas cheer. Note: Most of these links will only work once the post goes live on that day. We could add the links manually every day, but history shows that’s not possible. So it’s just more efficient to have them all there now.

The rules for our calendar coordination are the same as last year:

Any game released this year is eligible for inclusion, including games released in Early Access, games released after an Early Access period in 1.0, or remasters or remakes that we consider special keep remarkable. We sometimes allow games from December of last year to creep in if they came out after voting closed, and games that we can expect to release in 2024 her year, even if they didn’t come out in 2024. For example, a live service game that suddenly skyrocketed in numbers, an old indie game that made a breakthrough out of nowhere, or big transformative DLC would count.

Voting is done by everyone on the team writing a list of up to ten favorite games from that year, with the first on the list getting 10 points, the second getting 9 points, and so on. These lists were compiled to create the definitive Advent calendar list, which produced a clear winner this year.

The RPS calendar came out in 2007 and virtually every year since then: 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. In 2014 we ran the RPS Best Bests, which were exactly the same except they weren’t based on a calendar. We have returned 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 crazy years (2008 and 2014).