Celebrating all things tense, unnerving, haunting, and agonizing!

Guidelines

You can submit a horror game, but do not have to! All genres are accepted as long as your game has prominent gothic or existential elements. Some potential topics:

• A reckoning with wilderness, time, or identity
• Duplication, reproduction, obsession, or cycles
• Isolation, loss, or dissociation
• The body, sensation, or carnality
• Fragility, intelligence, or compulsion
• Emptiness or omnipresence
• The utterly unexplainable
• Anything else confrontational that makes you question what it means to be human

Whether subtle or in-your-face, all submissions that explore that heavy, deep-seated gnawing feeling (rather than anticipation of a specific scary event) are welcome.

Rules

1. Your work must be original and created within the submission window. Paid assets are not allowed. Credit any assets you borrow. Optional addition: In the spirit of the jam, it is recommended but not required to use no borrowed assets and create everything from scratch. Find a team on the Discord!
2. You can submit your game to at most 2 other jams, but it must fit our jam's theme (produced with this jam in mind) to be a qualifying entry
3. Teams can be up to 3 people. You can find a team on the Discord, linked below!
4. NSFW is allowed, but you must mark your game as adult content and include content warnings on game page
5. NO AI of any kind, altered or not. This is a very strict requirement, no exceptions
6. Submissions may be in any language as long as the criteria are met
7. Even though video games are the primary focus of this jam, physical games (e.g. gamebooks, TTRPGs) are permitted. However, you should include some kind of meaningful audio and visual component (not to the rulebook, but for actual play) if you want to be ranked on those voting criteria

Any questions on rules can be asked on the community page or the Discord, linked below!

Voting Criteria

• Gameplay: Is the game well-designed, with compelling mechanics? Does the gameplay enhance the artistic vision of the game?
• Memorability: How novel, unusual, or interesting is the game? What does it change about how we see the gothic or existential?
• Audio: How thoughtful is the sound design? If there is music, how well is it composed and performed?
• Color: Regardless of other visual elements, how masterfully does the game utilize color?
• Sense of Dread (Not Fear): Is the game scary because it presents a philosophical, moral, or existential crisis? How powerfully does it make the player feel trapped in that crisis?

Jam Schedule

Submission period: January 22, 2026 to April 9, 2026

Voting closes April 21, 2026

Discord

Ask questions, discuss, and find a team! https://discord.gg/DUVD2ggnJp