ranzware
The genre that has spiraled out from the surprise success of Vampire Survivors is one of my favourites to cover—whether I’m mining for gold, hitting people with swordfish, or building weapons out of brains and chimpanzee spines. The genre keeps growing and mutating, becoming ever more diverse and bursting with creative new ideas. It’s been a joy to watch it grow.
Just one question: what the hell is the genre called?
Whenever I write up my impressions of one of these games I end up having to name-drop Vampire Survivors in the opening paragraph just to explain what I’m talking about, because somehow over two years on from that game’s release and the explosion of mimics that followed, we still haven’t figured out a widely accepted name for this genre.
There are some strong candidates, for sure, but none so widely recognised that I can just drop them without explanation. Even Steam’s user-defined tags don’t reflect any kind of consensus yet, with these games just having “bullet hell” and “action roguelike” slapped on them for now as a particularly misleading temporary solution.
That worries me—not just because I’m sick of not knowing what to call it in headlines, but also because we’re rapidly approaching a point of no return.
Something has got to stick, and in my experience if fans of a genre don’t rally around a good option, you end up with a terrible one by default. How did we ever let “MOBA” take its place in the canon? And don’t even get me started on the perverse Frankenstein word that is “metroidvania”.
So let’s get this sorted out now, once and for all. I’ll run down the choices, work out their pros and cons, and then pick the best one—and then we all just have to agree to use that one from now on. Simple.
The options
Vampire Survivors-like / Survivors-like
This is the one we seem most in danger of getting lumped with, primarily because it’s the most straightforwardly descriptive—anyone who knows what Vampire Survivors is will understand what genre you’re referring to.
But it hardly trips off the tongue, does it? And there are few things less pleasant than a genre name with capital letters in it.
Once upon a time there was an entire genre called “Doom clones”. It was a very clear title back then—but we soon outgrew it in favour of the much cleaner and more timeless “first-person shooters”. We need to do the same here.
Rating: 2 / 5
Bullet heaven / reverse bullet hell
This seems to be the next most popular term flying around right now—enough that these games regularly get tagged as “bullet hell” on Steam, despite really having very little to do with that genre.
That’s the crux of the issue with this one, really. The idea is that bullet heaven is the opposite of bullet hell—i.e. that you’re the one launching screen-filling bursts of projectiles, rather than dodging ones from enemies. Really though, the two genres have very little in common mechanically, and fans of one are not especially likely to be fans of the other.
It’s naming a genre based on how its games look rather than how they feel or how they work mechanically, which seems like a mistake—especially given that we’re increasingly seeing examples of this genre that don’t look like that, for example replacing projectile spam with action-RPG-style attacks and spells in Halls of Torment, or martial arts swipes in Karate Survivor.
Rating: 1 / 5
Survivor
Indulge me in a suggestion of my own—what about just calling them “survivors” or “survivor games”?
Though this isn’t a term in current use by players (that I’ve seen, at least), it is being used as a signifier by devs. From Karate Survivor to Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor to Soulstone Survivors, that word in a title is used to tell potential players what genre to expect.
It’s less of a mouthful than Vampire Survivors-like, while still acknowledging the connection in a way that any fans of that game should recognise at a glance.
Any drawbacks? Well… it might be a little close to “survival”. Where two very different genres have very similar names, confusion is definitely possible. Or worse, it could lead to cross-contamination—you don’t want to end up auto-punching trees, do you?
Rating: 4 / 5
Auto-shooter
I’m pretty sure Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is the one that tried to coin this term, though not I suspect very successfully. Still, it seems like a good option to me. It clearly describes what you do in the genre: you shoot automatically. It also evokes top-down shooters, which is a much more appropriate reference point than the more specific bullet hell.
It does sound a bit close to auto-battler, a genre that does have some conceptual overlap but is ultimately very different. There’s also a bit of a vibes issue, similar to bullet heaven—while it feels like a perfect term for a game like Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor where you’re literally shooting guns automatically, it feels a little off for the various examples more inspired by fantasy action-RPGs.
Rating: 3 / 5
AWSR
Pronounced “awe-sir”, this stands for “Auto-attacking Wave-based Survival RPG”. Look, we had to at least have a go at some kind of snappy acronym, even if we all knew it wasn’t going to work. Forget this one. Though at least it’s still better than MOBA
Rating: 0 / 5
The winner
It’s got to be survivor, right guys? Give it a try.
- “My favourite genre is survivors.”
- “Have you tried that new survivor game yet?”
- “Huh, why did they call it Star Wars Jedi: Survivor if you have to swing the lightsaber manually?”
Apologies for tooting my own horn, but it does seem like an elegant solution to me—descriptive while also enshrining the place of Vampire Survivors in the canon, without being ugly to read or awkward to say.
So that’s settled—we’re all going to call them survivors from now on, and there shall no longer be any confusion. Spread the word, add it as a tag on Steam, bring it up in conversation at every opportunity. Sorted.
Er… that is, unless you have a better idea, in which case let me know in the comments. But I’d rather you didn’t. There’s no time left for arguing—we need a consensus on this folks, and we need it yesterday.
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Kurt Indovina
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