I've heard "reverse bullet hell", it's decent.
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Boring after 20 minutes type games?
Its a passive horde survival game.
The game play is rotating the stick in a rough circle so you keep moving that you can do without even having to look at the screen while you hoover up tiny pellets that make you stronger to survive more blobs of color on the screen.
Have any of you ever tried risk of rain or heck even cuphead? You can have rapid gameplay and a point to it.
This feels like the modern bathroom book as a game. Fun but just enough to be over when you have finished something more worth your time.
Twi-like
Bullet heaven is likely what will stick. If you don't like that it's also the name of a game, consider that metroidvania contains the name of two games.
I call them circle spawners. The enemies spawn in a rough circle around you and close in. I think you can modify that with other terms depending on the specifics of what the game adds in.
Distilled roguelite
It's a horde survival shooter with upgrades
We've established a name already in the indie space for these. It's a "horde survival shooter" damnit.
Not to be confused with the plain old "horde shooter" like your helldivers 2 and what not
Other comments said it but I think bullet heaven is perfect
Let's just stick with survivor, or survivor-like. It works fine for roguelikes and soulslikes. No need to force a genre name.
Survival games are already a thing, though.
So? SurvivAL is not the same as survivOR.
Seems like an insufficient difference for two genres that are so distinct. Plenty of opportunities for confusion.
Action, Adventure, and Action-Adventure are all different genres. I think people will figure it out.
Those aren't words that can easily be confused for each other due to accents or minor variance in pronunciation.
And besides, we already have a genre name for Vampire Survivor-alikes. They're bullet heavens.
No we don't, never heard anyone use that term when referring to games that are similar to Vampire Survivors. It's always survivor-like game. Also, bullet heaven is not even an accurate description of the game, as in lots of these games you don't throw lots of projectiles around. If you're going to force a name change, Mob Hell is a way better descriptor.
Mob Hell is a way better descriptor
Oh, I like this one
They're already called reverse bullet hell?
What in the heck is a reverse bullet hell? If a bullet hell is "so many bullets" then I have to image it's like... Not many bullets at all. That sounds too easy.
It should be more in inverse bullet hell: it's hell, but not for you.
Normal bullet hell (Touhou): the enemies shoot a hell of bullets at you. And your job is to avoid it. Reverse bullet hell (Vampire Survivors): you shoot a hell of bullets at the enemies. And your job is to shoot even more, bigger, stronger bullets.
I didn't come up with the name, that's just what people have been calling it for as long as I can remember.
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Too late it's Vamvor.
Vampvore
roots in voreaphilia
Vampier
Survivor
I thought it was already considered a reverse bullet-hell. But I do like Bullet heaven as well.
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Sucky N Fucky
It's an autoshooter isn't it?
Vampire Survivors would be a rogue-like autoshooter.
Like Backpack Battles is an autobattler.
Edit:
As raised in the comments, actually a rogue-lite as VS has meta-progression.
Yep definitely is. I guess OP hasn't heard of brotato and deep rock survivor either.
I don't know why people keep calling it rogue like. Rogue-likes have a lot more randomness than an easily manipulated item drop system. I don't know that a random map is a necessity but it certainly needs something along those lines.
Rogue had you start from scratch with a new character in a random map every time.
Rogue-like games initially meant you start from scratch in a new random world, but you incrementally improve your experience by small buffs you can buy, or changing your starting equipment / skills (sometimes by changing out which character you start as).
Rogue-like has slowly changed to mean "start over regularly but slowly unlock new items/buffs/equipment/characters/etc to help you further explore a world which may or may not be random"
So it applies to games like Risk of Rain (and 2), Balatro, Dead Cells, and Rogue Legacy, just to name a few examples (though 3 of those are 2d platformers with randomly generated worlds if I remember right...).
But yeah it seems to have morphed into a broadly used term for games where you get better over time through purchasing permanent buffs and whatnot (as well as natural skill), but are forced to restart any time you die.
Vampire Survivors and other similar style games have you constantly restarting when you die so I think the term fits as a partial descriptor.
Maybe we could adopt the idle/clicker game term Prestige, but that's more of a voluntary restart when you hit a wall and can't progress, so I don't think it quite works.
For a while people tried to differentiate roguelikes, which maintained the lack of metaprogression, with roguelites, which did have progression. But that was pretty clearly a losing battle, the two names were far too similar to stay distinct as long as one or the other took off. Some few pendants still try to maintain the distinction, but that ship sailed ages ago.
I still use it but there are maybe 2 true rouge-likes published a year and no one plays them so it really doesn't matter.
Just an addendum:
Risk of Rain does not have randomly generated maps. The maps are from a predetermined set, I believe 6 for each biome.
They call it a rogue-like because there is meta-progression even though you "start over" each run.
I've also heard Autoshooter. Seems as good of a genre name as any.
I've just been calling them exactly that: vampire survivors like. It's a mouthful, so I'm open to the alternatives.
Digital crack
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