3 out of 5

Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame! is its own worst enemy.  As the mostly mute Killy – another amusingly on-the-nose named protagonist, a la Berserk’s Guts – guns his way across a sparse, tech-ravaged, elevator-shaft vertical landscape, going – but of course – up, Nihei seemingly allows his story to grow in turn, not programmatically – i.e. by typical plot beat design – but as the elements occur to him to draw in.  It reads as though we are exploring a dream, vagueness casually shoring up into a recognizable something, which may become a motif, before a scene change and we lose focus, starting the process again.

Blame!’s chapters, or “logs” are connected, and we hear about Net Terminal Genes that Killy may be tracking for some organization, and human settlements scattered between the thousands of floors we ascend and the “Authority” machines that seemingly hunt them, and cyborgs, and mutations, but we hear about these things almost between sentences, and a log ends post some suddenly explosive conflict, the next log starting up in the aftermath, but Killy and the story almost unaware of that same aftermath.

The disconnect is, on one hand, incredibly fascinating.  Killy seems to he learning about most of this at the same time as us, but then he just looks toward the vertical horizon and soldiers on, leaving us with the choice to either put the book down or follow; Blame!’s uncluttered world-building may not exactly pose questions so much as just admit they exist, but it’s enough to get us to turn the page, the ride slicked by Tsutomu’s frantic line style.

Which is, though, confusing as hell.  Blame! starts out visually sketchy as fuck, determining motion from the background a chore.  A couple chapters in and Nihei learns to define his characters against his settings, but the geometry – the general look borne, to me, of 90s FPS like Star Wars Dark Forces, all deep pits and endless ceilings and cold technology – remains confusing, the too-huge settings hard to properly visualize as size ratios fluctuate and inertia (characters going from stand-still to a blur) seems non-existent.  Like the story, you end up getting by based more on feel than what you see, which, again, is cool but limiting.

Blame! is certainly not aimless – at the very least we know we have a goal of ascension – but its open-ended look and sound, which read like Nihei figuring our what he wants his story to do as he writes it, creates as many roadblocks as it does opportunities.  I’d say the opportunities win out, but we’ll see if this sense of forward progress will continue from book to book.