The RPS Advent Calendar 2023, December 9th

Congratulations! You've opened another door on the RPS Advent Calendar! That deserves a reward. Head to our rewards screen to collect it! No, not that one. Not that one either. Look, just follow the exclamation marks.

It's got the flashiest combat animations and the loveliest character designs of 2023: it's Honkai: Star Rail!

Ollie: When I first started playing Honkai: Star Rail, it was more for work than play. As a guides writer, you can't just ignore the next big HoYo game. You gotta grit your teeth and dive into their unintuitive, jargon-filled worlds, replete with rewards screens, daily challenges, and impossibly gorgeous character costume designs. I fully expected to bounce off Honkai the moment I'd completed the bare minimum amount of work required. Months later, I'm still playing. Honkai: Star Rail has slowly turned into an extremely cosy time-killing safe space for me, filled with satisfying daily routines, lively characters, great combat, great music, and some surprisingly rich storytelling.

Unlike Genshin Impact's open-world roaming and real-time fantasy combat, Honkai: Star Rail brings you a space opera of galactic breadth, split into small interconnected environments and flashy turn-based battles. And boy, are they flashy. Your party consists of four characters, each of which has a regular attack, a skill attack, and an ultimate attack that you can unleash once your character has built up enough energy. Every single character attack in the game is accompanied by a splendid mini-cutscene which condenses all that HoYo flair and polish down into bite-sized moments of brilliance. I'll never tire of Himeko sipping her tea in the foreground while a nuclear explosion decimates her enemies behind her. Nor of Gepard erecting a gigantic crystalline shield wall of ice to protect his allies. The game is pure eyecandy, barraging you with flamboyance and pageantry at every opportunity - and it works. It's all sublime.

The other thing that's kept me playing it the stunning amount of content. My jaw almost dropped to the floor when I realised several hours into my playthrough that, nestled inside an unassusming room and unlocked by a certain side quest, there's a gateway to an entire separate roguelite game mode, which alone has enough content to justify being its own standalone game release. There are other similar game modes dotted about the various worlds and levels of Honkai: Star Rail too, including a management sim mode where you're in charge of a museum and must assign characters to give yours, recover new artifacts, and so on. And that aside, you've also got the gargantuan main mode, filled with dozens of main missions and side missions and companion missions and daily missions... It's all really impressive.

Honkai: Star Rail brings all that over-the-top Genshin polish to a setting and a genre that grabbed me far more than Genshin's ever did. Yes, it's a gacha game, and the number of screens and rewards and bonuses and clickables can be overwhelming to new players. But it's one of the fairest models I've ever seen, and it never feels like it's truly out to trick you into spending money. I've played it since it came out, and I haven't spent a penny on it. But at this point, I feel like the game has earnt a bit of my money for showing me such a consistently good time this year.