It seems Steam has decided to jump into the spirit of the videogame award season with their very own Steam Awards, and they’re as wonderfully strange as you’d expect.
There are eight default awards for your consideration, all quite unlike anything you’d expect from The Golden Joysticks or The Game Awards, let’s take a look at them, shall we?
First there’s the ‘Test Of Time’ award, which asks users to vote on any game from before 2016 that still holds up by modern standards, and the ‘I Thought This Game Was Cool Before It Won an Award’ award, which is for best sleeper hit.
Next up is the ‘I’m Not Crying, There’s Just Something In My Eye’ which seeks to crown the biggest tearjerker, as well as the ‘Villain Most In Need Of A Hug’ award, which speaks for itself.
Following that is the ‘Just Five More Minutes’ award – the game that’s most difficult to put down, while the ‘Whoooaaaaaaa, Dude!’ prize will be given to the game with the biggest twist and/or shocking moment.
The ‘Game Within A Game’ award is for the greatest minigame (think along the lines of Gwent in The Witcher 3), while ‘Best Use Of A Farm Animal’ is also pretty easy to work out from context alone.
In addition to the above eight prestigious prizes, there’s the ‘We Didn’t Think Of Everything’ category which asks you, the gamer, to come up with your very own award.
As Steam describes this one:
There are as many great ideas for awards as there are great games to play. And so we turn to the Steam Awards Selection Committee to come up with their own category and nominee. Senior members of the Selection Committee will review the write-in entries and create an entirely new category based on the feedback provided.
To cast your votes – and try to come up with your very own award category – head on over to Steam now.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.