IDK About ‘Bullet Heaven,’ Steam

Yesterday Valve announced an update to Steam that added 17 new tags and removed 28 with the goal of “helping players identify the games that best fit their interests, and helping Steam generate appropriate recommendations.” Seems reasonable enough. But since I read the list of new tags—which includes relative no-brainers like “Organizing” and “Espionage,” as well as a couple, “Wuxia” and “Xianxia,” that are indicative of Steam’s growing Chinese popularity—one has lodged itself in my brain: “Bullet Heaven.” I just don’t think it works!

Valve describes Bullet Heaven as “The opposite of Bullet Hell; Focus on upgrades while automatically attacking hordes of enemies.” Sure, OK. But if you take a look at the rechristened genre’s Steam page, you’ll be immediately inundated with countless riffs on Vampire Survivors. That genre already has a name: Survivors-like. Is it the most elegant? No. But as with “Soulslike” in reference to games that owe their structure to From Software’s ubiquitous Souls series, Survivors-like stuck. People have been calling them that for years.

Moreover, Bullet Heaven is an instance of cute wordplay that doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. Moment to moment, Bullet Hell games don’t really resemble Survivors-likes at all; the (much-older) genre tends to involve piloting a spaceship or other small object down a linear track while endless, brain-melting bullet patterns spread out in front of you. One wrong move and you’re cooked—or at least severely damaged. Survivors-likes are, as Valve points out, typically reliant on auto-attack and focused on upgrades. The only thing the two genres really have in common is particle effects. They are not branches of the same evolutionary tree, as the names Bullet Hell and Bullet Heaven would imply.

I’m not the first to voice this misgiving. PC Gamer’s Robin Valentine attempted to give the genre a suitable stage name last year, rejecting Bullet Heaven (and ultimately going with “Survivor”) along similar lines:

The two genres [Bullet Hell and Bullet Heaven] 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.

That did not, however, prevent initiatives like the Bullet Heaven Festival from trying to canonize the name, with a poll that ran alongside a Steam sale late last year.

As I said earlier, I do not believe that Survivors-like is a particularly good name, but I think Bullet Heaven is worse. And the fact of the matter is, many game genres have janky, proper-noun-laden names. People have been trying to rechristen Metroidvanias for decades, but it just hasn’t worked. That’s what those are, and so shall they remain until the end of time. Now, admittedly, Survivors-likes haven’t been around for anywhere near as long; the term doesn’t have the same kind of history. But it is, in many cases, what people use, and inertia tends to win out in the end.

That, I suppose, is what makes all of this interesting: Steam has hundreds of millions of users. By simply stepping into the arena and putting its foot down, has it sent shockwaves that will ultimately bury other names—even if they’ve been around longer and make more intuitive sense? Will I one day call something a Survivors-like out of habit only to be met with blank stares? Hard to say with any sort of certainty, but knowing how pseudo-monopolies work, probably!