Jenny Jiao Hsia’s dazzling, semi-autobiographical tale of teenage life finds wit and warmth in its WarioWare weirdness, even as it deals with difficult themes.
“Just think of it like a video game!”, Consume Me’s increasingly put-upon protagonist Jenny tells herself early on as she prepares to take the dieting plunge. The final year of school is approaching, adult life is looming, and if that wasn’t enough, the words of her overbearing mother – how will she ever get a boyfriend if she doesn’t lose some weight? – are lodged in her brain. It’d be enough to overwhelm anyone, let alone a teenager still trying to find her place in the world.
Consume Me review
- Developer: Jenny Jiao Hsia, AP Thomson, Jie En Lee, Violet W-P, Ken “coda” Snyder
- Publisher: Hexecutable
- Platform: Played on PC
- Availability: Out now on PC (Steam, itch.io)
Consume Me is a semi-autobiographical work from co-designer Jenny Jiao Hsia that deals openly and honestly with some pretty tough themes, including dieting, disordered eating, and fatphobia. That might sound like a difficult sell, but Jiao Hsia’s slice-of-life adventure adopts a format that’s immediately, winningly approachable. This is a cheery, pastel-hued phantasmagoria of hyper-kinetic split-screen cutscenes, slapstick WarioWare-style minigames, and time management challenges that (“Just think of it like a video game!”) cleverly uses the language of the medium – its penchant for repetition and routine, its love of ever-escalating pressures – to mimic Jenny’s daily struggles.
Here, the perils of a drifting mind while studying are abstracted to a minigame where you attempt to align your furiously spinning gaze with the pages of your book as thought-bubble distractions rush in; where laundry folding is a game of lightning-fast reactions, and the simple act of walking the dog becomes a comical dance of poop dodging and cash grabbing as you navigate New York City’s streets. And all this minigame silliness is pulled together by a compellingly presented story, told with boundless energy and genuine wit, charting Jenny’s increasingly fraught journey into young adulthood.
Consume Me launch trailer.Watch on YouTube
Each chapter of Consume Me focuses on the kind of familiar right-of-passage events (summer pool parties, fledging romances, high school rivalries, and college applications) that, from the other side of youth at least, feel comparatively trivial. But most of us probably have enough residual trauma from our teenage years – when everything seemed to be of absolute, apocalyptic importance – that it’s easy to empathise with Jenny’s spiralling circumstances and feel the pressure of expectation just as vividly as she does; even if you didn’t have the kind of complex relationship she has with food.
For all its easy breeziness, Consume Me is, at its heart, a game about the unhealthy, unsustainable patterns people can become trapped in when trying to live up to impossible standards, whether they be external or self-imposed. And for Jenny, that manifests most prominently as an obsessive focus on her weight and food. Her initial dieting successes – swimsuit-body confidence! An adorable boyfriend! – are quickly internalised as a causal link that must be maintained, and so no matter what other complications emerge in her life, fastidious food management remains an ever-present aspect of the game. As she puts it, “If I can’t control this one part of my behaviour, then everything falls apart.”
Image credit: Eurogamer/Jenny Jiao Hsia/AP Thomson
Each day, you’ll diligently prepare another meal, attempting to place tetronimo-shaped food items into your grid-like stomach, Tetris-style. Each item has a Bite value (Consume Me explicitly avoids the term ‘calories’), and your goal is to fill Jenny’s Guts while keeping within the week’s Bite limit. It’s a brilliantly effective, and impressively economical, way of putting players into Jenny’s mindset, where food is framed as an adversary to be overcome rather than enjoyed.
There’s a lot of this kind of design elegance throughout Consume Me, where experiences – and even emotions – are conveyed as much through gameplay as story. That’s most evident in its overarching framework of time management, where you’ll need to use Jenny’s limited free time as efficiently as possible in order to complete each chapter’s checklist of objectives. Early on, her responsibilities – studying, chores, and sticking to her diet – seem manageable enough, but with only a few hours of free time available each day, staying on top of things quickly become a tricky (and stressful) balancing act. One wrong move can have a dramatic knock-on effect; overeat, for instance, and suddenly you’ll need to spend a precious hour exercising to get back within your Bite limit. Then there’s the added complexity of your ever-dwindling mood, energy, and guts meters, all requiring diligent maintenance in order to avoid locking yourself out of critical activities each day. You can probably see where this is going.
Image credit: Eurogamer/Jenny Jiao Hsia/AP Thomson
Once Jenny’s holidays are over and the school year begins, things get increasingly chaotic as her checklist of responsibilities grows ever-more demanding – essay writing, college applications, long-distance romance-ing, even the destruction of high school enemies, all piled on top of everything that’s come before. Increasingly, you’ll find yourself falling into unhealthy (and detrimental) habits – knocking back energy drinks and staying up late – just to squeeze a few more hours out of the day, and the sheer mental effort required to keep Consume Me’s plates spinning can be exhausting. Which is obviously the point.
Consume Me accessibility options
Reduce shake effect toggle; reduce flashing colours toggle; separate music and SFX volume sliders; subtitles in English, French, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.
It’s hard to criticise something as intensely personal and mechanically deliberate as Consume Me, where Hsia and co-developer AP Thomson have made very specific design choices in order to tell a very specific story. But it’s clear from Consume Me’s surprisingly accommodating difficulty progression and its presentational breeziness, that – for all its intentionally wearying cycles of repetition – this is a game the team wants players to see through to the end. I’m not sure it finds quite the right balance though, and for me, even with its relatively scant eight hour runtime, it did begin to outstay its welcome, still marching slowly toward the next inevitable escalation long after it felt like its point had been made. And I can’t help wonder if it might have been a little more impactful if it’d wrapped up sooner.
But when I think back on my time with Consume Me, it’s not the stresses that stick with me; it’s the game’s effervescent wit and invention, its canny design and generous spirit (even the most adversarial characters are sympathetically written), and more than anything, the powerful authenticity of its voice. As daft as it often is, this is a game that captures Jenny’s struggles and triumphs so beautifully, and so convincingly, even a sequence introducing her relatively brief flirtations with religion manages to feel – and I say this as someone who’s long been iffy about the whole church thing – genuinely affecting. Consume Me’s pacing didn’t always work for me, but it remains a fascinating, thoughtful, and impressively assured creation all the same. And I can’t help admiring its method – and its message – immensely.
A copy of Consume Me was provided for this review by Hexecutable.
