I like to look at the highest rated games with various filters. However, the sheer number of high-rated visual novels makes it difficult to find the kinds of games I'm looking for. In addition to selecting tags to narrow the selection to, I'd like to also have the option to exclude specific tags from the results.
Ideally it would apply for all types of filters so that people can look for non-free or non-paid games as well, but tags would be the main priority for me.
If you use various filters, your selection should only be a few hundred games and you can skim most of those in a few hours.
If you use the blandest of all filters, like visual novel + horror, you have about 5k games if you look at top-rated.
/games/top-rated/genre-visual-novel/tag-comedy/tag-horror is about 300 games.
Anyway, I am not sure what question you had for community support.
For various filters, I meant the filters in the side bar, e.g. "Play in browser", "Session length", etc. If I apply them with no genre restrictions, I still get thousands of hits.
I specifically don't want to go through each genre one-by-one, because I'm trying to look for games that would positively surprise me. However, this is difficult when 50-75% of the top-rated results are visual novels.
So, your question is, how to do this or is this just in the wrong section. This is questions and support.
Genres are regular tags. The only difference is, that in the url they are written as genre- instead of tag-. But they function exactly the same as tags. A game has 1 main genre and 10 tags, You can set all of those 11 tags to be "genres".
For randomly browsing you can use the randomizer /randomizer but it cannot filter by tags. Randomly browsing top games with the vague description of not liking visual novels is tough. A lot of games use visual novel as a tag, but are not actually visual novels. You will miss those surprising games. And a lot of games are story rich or have a lot of text and are not tagged visual novel.
So for the 1.5 million games here, it is a lot easier if you select a tag or two. Like action, or puzzle. Or whatever you actually like. Everything but visual novels is a bit vague.
Anywy, the main genre is displayed on the browse page, so they can be filtered easily client side. I made a script for that. It will not filter away all the visual novels, but at least the ones that do have it as their "main genre". I made another script (same page, no screenshot) to make games disappear, on the press of a button. This way at least you only have to look at them once.
You can also use the undocumented feature to exclude 1 tag. Pick your standard filters, add the ?... and put it in a bookmark.
Thank you for the plugin and thorough explanation! That actually looks very close to what I'm looking for. This idea was for adding the functionality into the UI and making it more general, which seems like it could be quite feasible and easier to use than undocumented URL parameters. However, my personal needs are satisfied with this.
