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Consume Me opens with a content warning for its depiction of disordered eating, dieting, and fatphobia for good reason. As Jenny struggles to juggle the pressures of her life as she navigates her final year of high school and applying for college, her relationship with dieting is inescapable. Far from your only task, the constant drumbeat of the diet serves to underscore how it makes everything else harder, too.
The dieting isn't just inescapable thematically, but mechanically. From slotting together Tetris-like blocks of varying calorie-like Bites, to simply balancing time spent on the likes of dating and studying with ensuring you keep up with a workout routine to keep you under your limit. Do you lose energy staying up later to both study and workout, making the next day harder? Or do you drop one by the wayside which may have different knock-on effects later? Consume Me is a pitch-perfect blend of narrative and gameplay, making it standout as one of my favorite games of the year.
Free time!?
Consume Me might sound dour, and it certainly can be heavy. But, more often than not, it's laugh out loud funny with a wonderful sense of humor. Semi-autobiographical, it's clear that developer Jenny Jiao Hsia isn't afraid to inject a bit of dark comedy into Consume Me's experiences.
Slotting Tetris-like bits of food onto a plate is evocative of the mindgames of watching what you eat, but the gamification is sometimes lampshaded by Jenny's wonderful little pupper who can appear to bounce around the edge of the screen, allowing you to offload one possible food item into its waiting mouth. Feed it cheese, and it'll bring back a bonus item you can use mid-event. You can also complete various chores to earn pocket money from your demanding mother. Clean the bathroom, and she'll lean in close to investigate its tidiness, an overly long arm sliding across the surface to check for dust.
An almost papercraft art style allows for some wonderfully expressive character art that comes through in the mini-games, which you can do in Jenny's free time – all making progress on the many, many bars that make up her life goals (which shift between each chapter). Read a book and Jenny's head spins 360-degrees, forcing you to mash the mouse button to concentrate when it matches up with the held book while avoiding. Aerobics has you ragdoll her limbs to match and hold poses. Walking your dog has you spinning one another on a lead in an effort to avoid poo while snatching dropped dollars off the street. One makeout scene has the characters' limbs tangle on and off screen implausibly like Scooby Doo. You can't not pop a smile.
You never have quite enough to do everything as neatly as you'd like.
All of these mini-games are incredibly fast-paced, almost Wario Ware like, stopping any one section from dominating. Instead, Consume Me is built around the macro-game of managing Jenny's free time. You never have quite enough to do everything as neatly as you'd like, and there's always an impending deadline to sweat over from getting your college application together to acing the first family dinner at your boyfriend's house. You have to juggle all of Jenny's needs like happiness, energy, and, of course, guts, to manage even more bars – you've got put in the work if you want to level up, erm, chores. Even so, Consume Me never overwhelms, presenting everything cleanly enough to be easy to understand. Fail, and you can restart a chapter while still leveling up as well.
Consume Me nudges you to game the system a bit the further you get into it, but most come at the cost of draining another meter instead. Pushing your bedtime later, as I mentioned above, gives more free time at the cost of energy. You can meditate to gain more energy at the cost of guts. Save money on makeup by doing it using free samples at the store, but again requiring guts. Likewise, outfits can give buffs to various activities, but will need to be washed by doing laundry to use again another day (run out of fits and your stinky struggle clothes will decrease both your happiness and energy to wear).
It does mean that a canny game master such as myself can discover some almost infinite loops to create some absurdly long days – such as combining an ungodly amount of coffee with an outfit that can make many exercises take up zero time. But it increases the risk of Jenny suffering a happiness decimating caffeine headache, and is even nodded towards with some combo-rewarding side goals. After all, despite the sense of pressure Consume Me evokes with its calendar of tasks, this isn't a game that wants to push you away.
Just when I thought the game was becoming too easy, the final chapter neatly subverts and even inverts some mechanical expectations. I'll avoid spoiling anything but oof, sometimes you can take living at home for granted, huh? The only place Consume Me struggles is with its ending – perhaps due to its semi-autobiographical status, the buildup throughout the game doesn't quite know where to go and just sort of dissipates across a somewhat lengthy epilogue that is, at the very least, fairly cozy.
In fact, Consume Me as a whole is consistently warm despite the heavy topics it tackles. Obviously, some may still find its topics a bit much if it resurfaces memories you'd rather left forgotten. But, Consume Me's tone is fantastic, as is the way it merges those narrative themes with smartly judged mechanics is a true marvel of game design. Only a few hours long, you owe it to yourself to experience the powers of deploying pocket cheese at the perfect moment.
Consume me is out now on PC. For more recommendations, head on over to our Indie Spotlight series.
