Dastardly December has done it again. Here I was having a nice time with November, joking about the time February tried to explain leap years to August, and the wintry month snuck up in my blindspot. Now December’s in the house, kicking back on the sofa with its feet up on the table. At least it’s brought a gift: the RPS Advent Calendar 2025, the list of our favourite games of the year.
The advent calendar consists of what we consider to be the best games of 2025. At noon each day for the next 24 days we will reveal a new pick. Click on the doors below to be taken to the article where at least one of the team will tell you about why that game made their year. The list is, as always, in no particular order – except for December 24th, which is our definitive and objectively correct game of the year.
For this year’s advent calendar image we went straight to the top and asked IGN’s senior editorial designer Amanda Flagg to put bear to paper. I think you’ll agree she captured both Horace’s fearsome magnificence and endlessness perfectly. (Providing a brief including the line “The most important thing is you never show his back legs – legend demands he has no rear” is possibly the highlight of my time at RPS so far.)
Our first advent calendar post will go live at midday today.
In previous years trying to add the links manually each day proved to a challenge. However, I’m going try and right past wrongs and update the advent calendar daily. My Horace bless my efforts. (If I mess this up royally, you can also find all our published picks here.)
The rules for our calendar voting are the same as last year:
Any game released this year is 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. This also means a game that has been selected in a previous advent calendar can appear again. 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 2025 being their year, even if they didn’t come out in 2025. 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 winner that just edged ahead of the competition.
There’s still time to take part in the festivities, too. Every year our readers organise the Advent Calendar Guessing Game and try to guess what will make our selection. Though, you’ll have to be quick. While late entries are allowed, with each passing day the maximum number of points you can earn diminishes.
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, 2023 and 2024. That makes this the ninteenth RPS advent calendar, if you count the freak years (2008 and 2014).
