Blame-likes - The definitive guide to all Blame! inspired games
Published on 20 January 2025BLAME! has been a particular interest of me for quite a while now. The Manga bei Tsutomu Nihei is a dispiction of an infinite world, unlike any other, where Nihei asks how beings cope when scale, technology, and time have grown beyond human comprehension.
Killy’s trek through an infinite, half-dead Megastructure spotlights radical isolation; the rare moments of contact matter because they show why connection is worth crossing light-years of concrete. The ever‐mutating “City” embodies runaway automation—machines keep building without motive, forcing characters to question what humanity means when the built world no longer needs humans at all.
Finally, the quest for the Net-Sphere gene frames survival as an information problem: if you can’t communicate with the system, you’re erased. Each theme interlocks—architecture dwarfs people, people lose agency, agency can only return through regained communication—so the manga feels both cosmic and intimately anxious.
I want to dedicate this compendium to investigating any games more or less based on the BLAME! world. I'm calling them blame-likes and since it's a pretty term, you now have to use it too.
Before we begin, let's start by defining what we mean by blame-like.
The BLAME! world is most notably characterized by its Megastructure, which is a massive, infinite, and ever-expanding city. The Megastructure has no defined end and therefor can be assumed to be infinite. A blame-like therefor has to set in some kind of Megastructure. But the City’s endless accretion isn’t just scenery—it’s entropy made visible. Because the structure grows without design, every character’s choice is framed against a cosmic backdrop that says “nothing you build will last,”
The characters in BLAME!'s world have to grapple with the concept of infinity, and the implications in both space and time. Flashbacks show civilizations erased in what feels like overnight, yet characters wander for millennia-equivalents between panels. This distortion asks whether persistence itself is heroic when history can vanish faster than you can climb a stair.
These themes and aspects in total make up what I consider a blame-like
I'm not yet sure this list is complete, if it can even be that. I'll add more to it, as I work through the games.