this post was submitted on 19 May 2026

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Valve make adjustments to Steam tags, and they settled the Vampire Survivor-like argument with Bullet Heaven (www.gamingonlinux.com)

submitted 20 hours ago by GamingBot@lemmy.zip to c/gaming@lemmy.zip

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[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 20 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Some of the removals are great (you shouldn't be able to tag your game "Well-Written" or "Masterpiece") but some I don't understand. But I can't say I have encyclopedic knowledge of all the tags that exist so maybe most of the removed ones are already covered elsewhere.

Also yes, Bullet Heaven is a great genre name.

[–] Havatra@lemmy.zip 5 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

I thought the genre was "Bullet Hell"? So Bullet Heaven is now a new genre? And I wonder if the game called Bullet Heaven will be affected by this?

[–] eleijeep@piefed.social 25 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Bullet hell is where enormous amounts of bullets are fired at the player by relatively few enemies, requiring lots of memorisation and twitch reaction skill to avoid the fast and complex patterns that fill the screen. It is intentionally extremely challenging. eg. https://youtu.be/aosBBHSZE-A?t=802

Bullet heaven is where enormous amounts of enemies swarm a player who has ridiculous firepower to take out dozens of enemies at the same time, requiring little more than circle strafing and holding the fire button. It is intentionally casual, and the gameplay is about the RPG/roguelike upgrading aspect much more than the actual game mechanics. eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8TiJY3lXmQ

If you want a critical take of the difference between the two, and the direction of the games market from a shmup-fan's perspective, I found this review by The Electric Underground really interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSS_3iTIgA4 (it obviously predates this Steam label change, so there is some hand-wringing about what is being classified as bullet-hell).

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 points 15 hours ago

Bullet heaven is often more about making good builds than skills in pressing WASD

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 4 points 12 hours ago

Vampire Survivors and games inspired by it are the inverse of the bullet hell genre. Hence the the name "bullet heaven"

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 9 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Bullet Hell is a thing already, Bullet Heaven is the new genre pioneered by Vampire Survivors. It replaces "Vampire Survivors-like'.

[–] DdCno1@beehaw.org 2 points 13 hours ago

This reminds me of the gaming press transitioning from calling action games with a 3D first person perspective "Doom clones" to "first person shooters" (although "corridor shooter" was also a thing for a while, for obvious reasons).

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 13 hours ago

Ahaha, and Kenshi still avoids meaningful classification.

Oh yeah sure, sure, its an open world sandbox survival rpg.

Sure, yep, just like all the others.

Hahahah!

You could apply Wuxia and Samurai and Cult and Animals to it, arguably also Xianxia.

Oh and they've apparently reworked some older tags, so we would also have Consversation and Difficult.

I believe they coined their own aesthetic as 'Swordpunk', but it's currently just got 'Steampunk' and 'Post-Apocalyptic'... sure, that's kinda close, why not.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Can we still not do an "AND" search with two or more tags? So dumb.

If I wanted to search through a list of games with both X and Y tags, I cannot do that. Only X or Y. Makes no sense.

[–] Sv443@sh.itjust.works 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

This might be exactly what you're looking for: https://steamdb.info/instantsearch/

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 12 hours ago

Might be, thanks. I've used SteamDB to check price history, but never thought to use it this way.

Just makes no sense to me that you can't do it in Steam. Seems like it would be arbitrary to allow it.

[–] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 7 points 18 hours ago

Actually a perfect name, no complaints