I also would like specifically visual novels to stop flooding the store. so a new fix would be appreciated if anyone finds one. I don't know how url's work really. but I tried modifying the old method in many ways, but failed to get it to filter them out.
Viewing post in The ability to filter OUT genres
The "old" method only works if you are logged into your account. And while vn are a genre, genres are handled like tags. This can seem confusing if you look at urls.
https://itch.io/games/genre-puzzle/genre-visual-novel/tag-horror
That is two genres and one tag. You just strip the "genre-" or "tag-" and add "?exclude=tg.name" and replace name with visual-novel. No " and no / and no . when adding to the url.
You can use that in a bookmark for your favorite search.
The caveat is, that the urladd does not stay, when you change browse options. I made a tool for that, if you are comfortable and able installing browser addons. Works on Chrome. There is also a second tool that can filter by main genre. A main genre is the genre that is desigatned as the main genre. A game can have more than one.
We shall see how or if searchin / browsing might change in the future. Personally, I would welcome an improved recommendation system. Also, I do not filter out game tags, I filter out individual games. Tag filtering is nice on paper, but there are several issues with that, so maybe there are several different reasons, why there is no such feature yet.