“BEING A TEENAGER SUCKS. So we made a videogame about it.” These are the opening words on the Steam page for Jenny Jiao Hsia’s Consume Me, a “life-simulation RPG” about feeling “stupid, fat, lazy, and ugly in high school.” Now, I’m going to go out on a limb and say many of you that are of a post-high-school age probably don’t want to re-experience it anytime soon, but Consume Me looks like such a good time I’m going to suggest you do so anyway, especially because it just got a demo.
That self-described genre of life-simulation RPG certainly seems apt as the game sees you do things like performing Tetris-esque puzzles to make a well-balanced breakfast, putting make-up on, and walking your dog. It almost looks like an RPG by way of the mundane sections in any of the modern Persona games, said mundanity amped up and sillified to 11.
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Rather than an RPG mechanically though, there’s two things it reminds me of first and foremost. One is the WarioWare series, there’s a real oddball minigame feel to a lot of what Consume Me appears to offer, even if it’s a bit occasionally a bit slower paced than what the greedy yellow-capped… Wario is. It also reminds me of old Flash games – think Newgrounds, Miniclip, Nitrome, that sort of thing, the kinds of games you’d play during IT classes when you were meant to be putting an Excel sheet about the price of eggs together.
I’d actually seen a much, much earlier version of the game at the V&A’s Design/Play/Disrupt exhibition way back in, cripes, 2019, and was enamoured by it then. It’s great to see how far it’s come – it even won the IGF Grand-Prize earlier this year! No release date for this one just yet, but you can go ahead and wishlist it on Steam and check out that demo anyway.