Our 24 Favourite Games Of 2024

Don’t be misled by the simple synchronicity of the headline above. Since 2008, Rock Paper Shotgun has selected its 24 favourite games from each year—revealing them throughout December via the RPS Advent Calendar, one game behind each door.

This article compiles all those celebrated games and our accompanying coverage in a single, post-New Year reading experience—designed for fewer clicks and deeper immersion.

As always, the list is curated by the Rock Paper Shotgun staff through collective voting and discussion. Any game released in 2024 is eligible—including Early Access titles, full 1.0 releases, expansions, or major content updates that substantially refresh an existing game. Our aim is to cast a wide net and honour what we’ve genuinely played and enjoyed over the calendar year—not to be constrained by technicalities of release timing.

The list is intentionally unordered—except for the final entry, revealed on December 24th, which represents our definitive Favourite Game of 2024.

Don’t see your personal favourite here? It may not have made the Advent Calendar—but you might still find it celebrated in staff members’ individual Selection Boxes.

Factorio: Space Age

Ollie: Factorio was my gateway into factory-building games. My first three or four playthroughs were slow, arduous attempts to master conveyor belts, inserters, fluid dynamics, and biter defense. It took roughly 400 hours before I completed a run—and only then did everything click. I finally understood *what* to build and *when* to build it.

Then Factorio: Space Age arrived—and upended everything. In deliberate contrast to my earlier struggles, the first hundred hours flowed smoothly: familiar mechanics, intuitive progression. But the moment I launched my first rocket, the ground shifted. Beyond the atmosphere, new rules applied. I thought I knew Factorio’s language—only to discover I’d mastered just one basic dialect. With every new frontier and planet, I had to discard prior knowledge and begin anew. That made each planetary first contact among the most exhilarating gaming moments I’ve experienced in years.

Take Vulcanus—the lava planet. Here, iron and copper deposits are absent underground. You must manually mine rocks for trace ores, gradually scaling up until you can pipe lava directly into Foundries to mass-produce metals. Instead of water, sulfuric acid geysers supply steam when combined with calcite. And your builds must remain compact: you occupy a tiny safe zone surrounded by territories of colossal, near-invulnerable Demolisher worms—each touch fatal.

Not strange enough? Consider Gleba—a spongy, decaying world where raw materials spoil into useless gunk within minutes. Rather than starting with iron and copper, you harvest fruits and process them in organic machines powered by nutrients—not electricity. A bottleneck anywhere collapses your entire production line into nothingness, presenting some of the most brain-bending logistical challenges I’ve encountered in any factory game.

Or Fulgora—its oceans brimming with oil, lightning storms striking regularly, ancient ruins scattered across the landscape. In a brilliant inversion of standard Factorio logic, you begin at the top of the tech tree and work downward: salvaging high-tech processor chips and modular frames from ruins, then breaking them down to recover base resources like iron and copper. All while erecting lightning rods to survive storms—and potentially harness limitless energy from captured bolts.

Factorio: Space Age is staggering in scope and inventiveness. Playing it feels like experiencing several distinct factory games at once—cleverly interwoven, each strong enough to stand alone as one of the genre’s most compelling entries. It can be overwhelming—especially on a first playthrough—but its focus on player quality of life is unmatched. Even after 1,000 hours, I’m still discovering elegant little QoL tricks I can’t believe I played so long without. New building methods, expansion strategies, and ways to eliminate indigenous lifeforms—all part of the same relentless, joyful discovery loop.

It’s been a phenomenal year for factory games—perhaps the strongest ever. Satisfactory reached full release; Shapez 2 launched; yet Factorio: Space Age reaffirmed its status as the undisputed king of the genre. Set aside time next year to try it—but honestly? You might want to reserve the entire year.