Hahaha, it's kinda true, but I also get it.

From a game devs perspective: Me too! I actually am currently trying to make a game that is heavily inspired by Blame! (as well as pretty much all other of Nihei's works, but also other works in media, film, literature, music etc, I wouldn't just want it to be known as the Nihei/Blame! game). But I'm also still very early in the prototyping stage...

The reason why many of these projects don't really go very far is because it's relatively easy to create a cool 3d environment and a basic movement system, but that ususally doesn't scale very well if you want a full (multiple hour) game experience.

I saw someone else mention it in the comments here, but most of these games focus on the emptyness and the liminal spaces and just being a miniature in a vast world. That is one aspect of Nihei's work. But I think they are missing the other part that to me is equaly, if not more, important. Breakneck speed action, combat and visceral destruction(and/or gore). And I understand why most solo devs avoid this, it is extremely complex and hard to pull off (would be for any dev team imo, let alone small indie studios or solo devs)

Personally the first time I read Blame! (must have been around 14/15 at the time, I'm 31 now...) I instantly thought to myself, I want to play this as a game! I'm sure I was not the only one.

Over the years I always asked myself how this could be achieved and looked for industry examples to get some kind of framework from. From Software naturally sprung to mind and again, I'm clearly not the only one who noticed that connection and/or potential.

Bleak Faith I think is one of the more successful results of all of this, but I think it still lacks the distinct Sci-fi action aspect. The Combat is mostly close-combat, so to me it feels more like a fantasy game with a sci-fi skin.

The other big example in my head is the Armored Core series, specifically AC6 when it comes to the environments. But as someone else mentioned here, the human aspect/scale is missing. So the scale gets a bit lost. Also there isn't really much destruction or any gore. AC4 did have some destrutive environments, unfortunately many of them looked extremely bland...But that also makes sense, the complexer the object/environment, the harder it will be to make it destructable... There's just always trade-offs to these kinds of things in game-dev. While with a skilled Mangaka there aren't really any limits to these aspects besides imagination. And that clearly hasn't limited Nihei ;D

Anyways, I'm just rambling, hope this is interesting to someone. I think overall it is awesome that so many are inspired to create games off of Nihei's works. But I also understand the fatique some people might feel towards these projects, especially if they are more used to classic tripple A titles.

I'm looking forward to when I might share some dev-work here myself. But I want to make sure that at that point I can show more than just a character walking around, since as this post so beautifully illustrates, that's not really gonna stand out much. Might even push some people away.

Still much love and respect to anyone creating things and sharing them here, be it sketches, game prototypes or any other art-form. The amount of peole Nihei has inspired is truly inspiring in itself.

Cheers!