This piece discusses themes around disordered eating, dieting, and diet culture throughout.
I’ve spent far too much of my life deeply entrenched in diet culture and all of the bullshit that surrounds it, which made the early chapters of Consume Me feel like a terrifyingly accurate time capsule.
The game serves as a semi-autobiographical take on co-creator Jenny Jiao Hsia’s adolescent years in the early 2010s—from her final year of high school into college, all while dealing with bog-standard teenage girl woes like dating, chores, an ever-increasing mountain of schoolwork, and dieting.
It’s shocking how many parallels I was able to draw between Jenny’s experience and my own, both growing up and even now well into my adulthood. The self-deprecation, the ever-piling goals for what is ultimately an unattainable lifestyle, the not-too-subtle comments from family members. Accidentally making dieting your entire personality.
While Jenny gets older and her goals shift and grow in number, one thing centres around all of it: food, and eating less of it. Calories are “bites” and food are puzzle pieces that have to be slotted together all while staying under Jenny’s “bite par”. Every food piece comes with its own bite count—more convenient shapes will cost more bites, while unorthodox ones cost less.
If I go over par, I can exercise to bring the number down. Some quick bedroom aerobics will burn the most, or I can kill two birds with one stone and take the dog for a walk. Consume Me presents each part of Jenny’s life as a series of minigames stuffed within a management sim. Each activity takes up a certain amount of turns in my day, and I can increase my free time through things like drinking coffee or spending my energy meter to stay awake later than usual.
Managing my energy, mood, and guts takes an increasing amount of effort as I progressed through the chapters, but I found myself delighting in trying to provide Jenny the perfect life… as unsustainable as the entire thing was proving itself to be. It’s a cycle I’ve found myself in more than a few times as someone who’s had their own struggles with disordered eating, sometimes hitting a little too close to home how seriously I was trying to optimise every single part of Jenny’s lifestyle.
That’s partly because Consume Me’s minigames are just so damn darling to play. Watching Jenny’s limbs comically stretch and retract during the aerobics minigame, timing laundry folds perfectly to get a little extra cash off Mom, or shakily turning Jenny’s face from a dry spot-riddled mess to a perfectly made up mug still hasn’t gotten old even after several hours spent playing.
It almost made me forget that, ultimately, I’m piling an awful lot of expectations onto Jenny. The game does occasionally hint towards the effect it’s all having on her—like when I spend a chapter desperately trying to beat another girl Jenny has declared her rival, only to discover it’s in fact a friend who is terribly upset with Jenny for ignoring her all summer.
She also faces some consequences later in the game—which I won’t spoil her—but they didn’t feel directly tied to what sometimes felt like rather dangerous perceptions on dieting and desperately cloying at what amounts to an unattainable lifestyle.
I do wish Consume Me criticised Jenny for her behaviour a little more often—there’s seemingly no repercussions for going dangerously under my bite par, and she experiences very few effects of her continuous dieting. It almost made me feel bad that the game let me push her as much as I did, and I wish I’d seen at least a little bit of blowback for it.
But for what I find lacking in Consume Me, the game more than makes up for in wonderfully witty dialogue and a beautiful art style that adds warmth to what can be quite a cold subject matter. It’s relatable as hell in all the good and bad ways, and despite everything I found it difficult to come away not totally falling in love with Jenny and her struggles.
Consume Me is out on Steam now with a launch week discount.
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