Inside is this year's Unity Awards Golden Cube winner

The folks at Unity—as in the Unity game engine—handed out their Unity 2016 Awards on Tuesday at the Unite '16 gathering in Los Angeles, CA. The winners, all of which are video games created with the Unity engine, happen to have a couple of my favorites from this year in their midst. Namely, Inside and Firewatch.

Taking top honors with Unity's Golden Cube Award is Playdead's Inside, a science-lab waking nightmare, a serious mindtrip of a platformer, that's 100 percent in contention for my favorite game of the year [Gaming Nexus score: 9.8 out of 10].

Best 3D Visuals goes to Firewatch, a walking simulator adventure game with a travel poster art style that will look wonderful until the end of time. It also happens to be a mature, messy, hard-to-fully-accept-the-outcome radio drama played out between two stunted-growth adults [Gaming Nexus score: 9.5 out of 10].

The winners:

– Best VR Experience goes to Valve for The Lab.
– Best VR Game goes to Owlchemy Labs for Job Simulator.
– Best Mobile Game goes to Square Enix Montreal for Lara Croft GO.
– Best Non-Game goes to Google for Tilt Brush.
– Best Vizsim Project [What? - Ed] goes to Real Games for Factory I/O.
– Asset Store Award [Again, what? - Ed] goes to Code Respawn for Dungeon Architect.
– Best Student Project goes to Twirlbound at NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences for Pine.
– Best 2D Visuals goes to Swing Swing Submarine for Seasons After Fall.
– Best 3D Visuals goes to Campo Santo for Firewatch.

The Unity Awards were opened up to community votes in August. The community's votes acounted for 50 percent of the total vote, while Unity employees accounted for the other 50 percent.

Congratulations to the winners. You all made some games (and "non-games") that people will be talking about for years.