Yes, I understand that on principal. However, I've found that whenever i select a tag I am interested in (not story-rich, as that was something I assumed would bring up word-heavy games in the first place) that isn't explicitly an action genre tag like "platformer" or "bullet-hell", I tend to see a lot of visual novels anyway. And when I do filter out specifically "visual-novel", I instead see many horror games that I am not interested in. But, if I filter "horror", then the same thing happens in reverse.
How do I put this.
If you browse for a tag and all you see is visual novels, then, well, then this tag is obviously very popular for visual novels.
Of the ~900k games on itch, only 26k are tagged visual novel. There are 130k platformers. And only 350 games combining those two.
On the itch landing page, the two most popular tags are horror and visual novel. What does this mean? It means that developers that want to tag their game with popular tags might chose those tags, if they apply even remotely.
And it means, that the top of the popular browse will be populated with lots of those games. It should thin out a bit on the following pages.
You could also try the recent pages. But beware, lots of malware there. Be suspicous of "new" games. Use sandboxing (the itch app can set this up). The current filtering of itch is either broken or hopelessly overloaded, so there are still dozens of games getting through. They are uploaded on hacked accounts, so not even payment active is a green flag.
Yes, I understood what you meant. However, it isn't really my fault if game elements I enjoy are frequently paired with two ultra-popular tag categories, even when they barely apply. You mention this problem in your own third paragraph. I'm interested in games featuring anthropomorphic characters, for example, but looking up "Furry" + "Platformer" while excluding "Erotic" still nets me a lot of porn games because "erotic" doesn't cover related subtags like "NSFW", "Adult", or "18+". For every cute game like Fech the Ferret or Inukari, I see over ten other games that are fetish content or outright nsfw. If I could just exclude all adult content tags, I'd be a lot happier with my results.
I haven't really noticed a malware problem because I don't download most of the games I see, because most of the games I see up-front don't interest me. I have noticed a lot of rather cookie-cutter looking games, but I just figured it was the latest horror game / anime game / whatever other style trend. Game dev is easy to get into now, which is both a great thing and a terrible thing lol.
Go to your settings and uncheck ( ) Show content marked as adult in search & browse.
And consider not using furry to search for cute animals. The problem in general is, that attributes about the main character are not commonly tagged. Furry does not even exist as a tag on Steam. Look at the 400+ game tagged sonic on itch. Most of them feature a certain Hedgehog. But only 2 of them are tagged furry. And in this context, most people that do care to tag attributes about the character do not use "furry" to talk about cute anthro animal heroes.
Look at a popular game, Backpack Hero.
Genre Role Playing, Card Game, Strategy
Tags 2D, Cute, Deck Building, Dungeon Crawler, Pixel Art, Roguelike, Roguelite, Turn-based
No mention, none at all, that all the characers are anthropomorphic animals.
I guess it is just so very common to see talking animals acting like humans. Just look at all the animation movies. Or comics with talking ducks and mice. And of course video games. You would not label those items as "furry".
Maybe start at "cute" and scroll till you see hairs. Look at examples and note what tags are used.
