In Consume Me, you take on the role of Jenny: young, in love, and entering her final year of high school. Make meticulous scheduling decisions to maximize your glow-up! Solve the puzzle game of dieting! Evade distractions as you pursue scholarly success! Do chores to get money from mom at a rate much lower than minimum wage!
Developed by: Jenny Jiao Hsia, AP Thomson, Jie En Lee, Violet W-P, Ken “coda” Snyder
Played on: Steam
Length: 7 hours
A review key was provided by Hexecutable.
Too often games that tell stories like Consume Me attempt to foster empathy in its players by throwing on the waterworks. The somber tone, the emotional music, the sad monologue speaking directly into your earholes. And while I love a good tearjerker as much as the next gamer, it was refreshing to experience a game that completely deviated from the norm.
Consume Me is a semi-autobiographical game about disordered eating developed by five friends, one of whom the protagonist is based on. You play as Jenny, a final year high school student who is trying to maximise her summer glow up with the to-do list to end all to-do lists. From chores and homework, to shopping and dieting, make meticulous scheduling decisions to ensure that Jenny achieves all her goals or her life is, like, over.
I’ve always considered the golden benchmark for a good simulator is how much it gets inside your head. When you close your eyes at night, how much of your mind immediately drifts to your next quest? Do you have to stop yourself from thinking about things in game terms? Consume Me, quite literally, consumed my entire brain with a management system that shouldn’t be as addictive as it was.
Each chapter of Consume Me takes place over one or two weeks, in which you manage Jenny’s schedule on a daily basis. Every decision you make — from the clothes she wears in the morning, to the food she eats for lunch — affects her Mood, Energy, Hunger, and Bites meters. Balancing those meters is more challenging than expected, especially when overeating during lunch means you have to spend the afternoon exercising, but exercising ruins your mood to begin your summer reading, and so on and so forth.
Playing this game sometimes feels like you’re chasing an endless loop of debuffs, but that’s also what makes it addictive to play. Punishment is baked into every choice, but there are ways to game the system. You can Stay Up Late to earn more action points, Call Boyfriend for a mood and energy boost, or even Apply Makeup to receive a random status buff. The game makes it exceedingly clear that Jenny is attempting something difficult but not impossible, and the knowledge that perfection is within arm’s reach is tantalising.
Despite its over-the-top presentation and quirky writing, there are moments in the game that are tough to watch; but in the way that it’s tough to watch coming-of-age movies without cringing because it comes too close to the truth. Each time Jenny thinks she can grit her teeth and pull through a rough spot, life never gets any easier. The chapters get harder, the days get shorter, and her to-do list keeps on growing.
For a few short hours, I found myself becoming obsessed with the idea of a perfect schedule the same way Jenny was becoming obsessed. Fully aware that the decisions I was making were probably unhealthy, but unable to stop striving for a perfect run and a completed to-do list. I wasn’t just playing as Jenny anymore, I was Jenny. And it only made the emotional undertones of the game hit that much harder.
The challenge with telling a story based on real life is real life doesn’t come with storybook endings. Consume Me works its way up to a climax that doesn’t quite stick the landing, but it isn’t without merit. While it could have done with another chapter or two to flesh out the ending, I can definitely appreciate a game as off-beat and darkly humourous as this one having an ending that feels real above all else.
Verdict: Like A Bag of Chips
Consume Me is one of the strangest life simulators I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing. Darkly humourous and delightfully over-the-top, this semi-autobiographical game features an addictive gameplay loop and quirky writing that doesn’t detract at all from its message about disordered eating and the pitfalls of perfectionism.
