“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.
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.