Last year, I received a message asking if I could introduce these awards to my Instagram followers.
I'm only getting around to properly looking at them now.
I was quite busy last year and didn't do nearly as much curator work as I would have liked.
Sorry about that.
And thank you for giving someone with all of about 300 Instagram followers an opportunity like this in the first place.
Anyway.
The Ultimate Trick or Treat Game Awards.
UTOTG Awards, apparently.
I apologise.
That abbreviation is going to take me a while.
The full name is considerably easier to remember.
The basic idea seems to be a smaller horror-game awards event, something for developers who may never find themselves standing on the stage at one of the larger year-end ceremonies.
Winning something like The Horror Game Awards is, presumably, a tremendous honour for a horror developer.
It's also an honour available to a very limited number of people.
The horror-game market is enormous.
And crowded.
So I imagine there must be plenty of developers who reach the end of the year, look at all the awards going elsewhere and think:
"I didn't win anything."
"Maybe I'm not actually very good at making horror games."
That last part is my own interpretation, of course.
But it isn't coming entirely from nowhere.
The UTOTG Awards openly describes itself as a young event without much authority or grandeur yet. Its stated goal is simply to celebrate horror games, from hidden indie projects to AAA releases, and hopefully give the winners a little extra joy from knowing that somebody noticed and appreciated what they made.
The 2025 version puts it even more cheerfully.
It calls itself a "young and scrappy tradition" in the horror scene and says that any game capturing the spirit of Halloween deserves its moment in the moonlight, whether it's a tiny indie nightmare or a full-scale AAA production.
I like that.
Perhaps that is what these awards are for.
Not prestige.
Not industry authority.
Just another little place where someone can say:
"Hey.
Your horror game was good.
We noticed."
UTOTG Awards...
Sorry.
Still not a brilliant abbreviation.
Lovely full name, though.
There are already quite a few winners I know very well.
The Cabin Factory.
MiSide.
Frozen Friday Night: The Eve.
V Rising.
SILENT HILL 2.
Buckshot Roulette.
All very good horror games.
The others are mostly new to me, but quite a few of them look interesting too.
So this awards show has already done one useful thing.
It has added more horror games to the increasingly unreasonable pile of things I need to play.
I'll probably end up curating some of them eventually.
There is another little detail I noticed.
The 2024 winner badges were quite colourful.
Gold, orange, red, a bit of dimension, a little visual chaos.
The 2025 badges are much simpler.
Mostly white.
I like both.
I have no idea whether the change happened for some practical reason or simply because somebody fancied a cleaner design.
Either way, I'm curious to see whether 2026 changes again or keeps the 2025 look.
The judging panel consists of:
Roxy the Tracking Ghost
A spectral investigator haunting the internet in search of hidden gems.
Little Pumpkin Jackie
A tiny pumpkin with very large opinions.
Grandpa Franken
A veteran gamer with a monstrous sense of fun.
Poe the Dark Bard
A poetic critic searching for beauty in the darkness.
Vampie, the Adolescent Girl
A nocturnal teenager with an appetite for frightening adventures.
They all sound perfectly qualified to judge horror games to me.
The awards themselves are split into ten categories:
Best Zombie Game
Best Slasher Game
Best Vampire Game
Best Evil Game
Best Haunted Game
Best Paranormal Game
Best Creature Game
Best Cosmic Game
Best Sci-Fi Game
Horror of the Year
Horror of the Year.
HOTY.
Now that's an abbreviation I can remember.
The 2024 HOTY winner was Buckshot Roulette, while MiSide took the award in 2025.
I imagine receiving that one feels rather nice.
Actually, looking through all this makes me wonder whether I should do something similar myself at the end of each year.
HORRORBANOFFEE's Carefully Selected Horror Delights of 2026.
Something like that.
Best Horror Puzzle Game:
Creature Kitchen.
Best Anomaly Game:
Metro Anomaly.
Best Ghost Game:
NO DOUBT.
Best Zombie Game:
Project ACCIPITER.
Best Slasher Game:
Escape from Yandere.
And so on.
I have absolutely no idea whether I'll actually do this.
But it sounds fun.
And perhaps that is the nicest thing about the UTOTG Awards.
Horror games give us worlds full of zombies, ghosts, killers, vampires, demons, monsters, Cthulhu and radiation.
Somehow, this little awards event makes that rather hostile world feel warm for a moment.
There's no great claim to authority.
No enormous stage.
No attempt to convince you that these are the only games that mattered.
Just a group of horror fans pointing at some games and saying:
"We liked these."
That's nice.
The awards also say that they don't accept advertising fees from developers or publishers, and they don't publicly share contact information because it isn't necessary for the judging process.
The judging itself is apparently conducted in secret, spooky and suitably sombre ways.
So there doesn't appear to be much of a traditional application process.
Which means entering the UTOTG Awards seems remarkably straightforward.
Release a horror game.
Although there is one thing I'm not entirely sure about.
Every winner I've seen so far is available on Steam.
The official eligibility information gives the release window, running from Halloween to the following Halloween, but I haven't found anything saying that Steam is the only eligible platform.
Maybe itch.io releases count too.
Maybe other storefronts do.
I don't know.
So let's make the advice slightly safer.
Release a horror game on Steam.
Your own lovely horror game.
Oh.
One final thing.
It looks like the UTOTG Awards uses Blogger.
So do I.
Their favicon still appears to be the default one.
I would probably change that.
It may add approximately 0.7 points of authority.
You're welcome.
Anyway.
Halloween is already only about two months away.
Christmas isn't much further behind.
Time moves disturbingly quickly.
So if you're making a horror game and hoping to appear in one of these things someday:
Finish it.
Release it.
Make it something worth finding.
Roxy will take care of the rest.
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45341709/
https://utotgawards.blogspot.com/p/the-ultimate-trick-or-treat-game-awards_5.html