Consume Me is a Game That's Well Worth Waiting Six Years to Finish. Here's Why:
- Marielle Bokor
- 10 minutes ago
- 7 min read
When you spend a long time with something, it starts to take up space inside you. Maybe it’s a back corner you rarely visit, but when it’s been in your life for years and you revisit that place, you realize how much you care about it, and how hard it might be to let that thing go.
With a game like Consume Me, it’s incredibly appropriate, but that doesn’t make it any easier for me to write a review for a game I first discovered at local indie games festival BitBash here in Chicago in 2019. I was sitting inside the Museum of Science and Industry, one of the coolest places for an indie game festival I can think of, and it was set up in a little alcove. I sat down with it, and within about ten minutes, I knew it’d be something I’d look out for from then on.
Six years later, and not only has it gone to full release, been incredibly well received with big wins at indie game events as well as larger industry invents, with nominations for game of the year at the Indie Game Awards and a nomination for Games for Impact at The Game Awards, but also - I got to finally sit down and play it all the way through. And while I knew it was special, I couldn’t have predicted it’d become one of my favorite indie games of all time, and absolutely change me for the better.
Consume Me is an extremely honest game about our relationships with food and the struggles of growing up, being in a femme body, parental, cultural and societal pressure, and chasing perfection. That’s a lot, and it’s probably not the first thing you’d think of when you think of setting some time aside to game, but at every turn, this “little game” bursts at the seams with depth, humor and relatability, until it finally wraps up and you’re crying your way through the credits. Yes, really. Crying a LOT.
I’m not going to hold it to a genre, because it’s too unique. Consume Me is a sort of slice of life narrative game that involves a lot of individual management tasks and has some minigames that are integral to it. More on that later.
In Consume Me, you play as me. Well, not ME, and not exactly dev Jenny Jiao Hsiao, and not exactly you, per se, but either a person very relatable to you OR a protagonist you can very heavily relate to. And it doesn’t take long. The main character has the exuberance of childhood and frustration of having no control over the things happening to her or around her that are maybe not as close to the surface or as volatile when we’re adults, but certainly still create a lot of life’s turbulence at any age.
And here’s the thing. There are actually a LOT of games that tackle this and have a great sense of humor about growing up. And some of them are among my favorites, but none of them marry absurdity, emotional depth and mechanics so well as Consume Me. In fact, few games I can think of use mechanics so effectively that you can actually feel the weight of your actions. So what is the gameplay loop actually like?
Stop me if you've heard this one:
You've got very specific health, academic, and social goals.
There are 24 hours in a day
You need money, but you also need to exercise, eat right, and do chores
Want a relationship? Do you have TIME for one?
By Wednesday, you're hopped up on caffeine and feeling good. You’re motivated, and you're gonna do the things.
On Friday, you find out you're short 12 dollars for your college application fees, have no energy at all, no laundry done, and can't go to the party where everyone else will be, because you're gonna have to don the pizza pjs, wash the clothes, scour the bathroom, and see if you can come up with a few more dollars before the cycle starts again
I’m sorry, is this not sounding fun?
What’s most genius to me about Consume Me is that…it kinda is fun. If it wasn’t, it’d be pretty easy to just drop the game after a few half-hearted attempts. But Hsiao put a LOT of thought into how the individual needs - energy, mood, nutrition, knowledge, etc - would be gained, lost and managed. Each aspect of your character as a whole person is “controlled” by a different set of tasks/mini-games.
As the title would suggest, the most prominent one is your diet and exercise. You’ve gotta look good to get a date, go to a dance, please your mom, and not go into a panic when you try to put on a swimsuit at the department store. This means you need a balanced diet - and Consume Me takes that pretty literally. Each meal you eat is a game akin to Tetris, where each individual morsel consumed must fit in your allotted amount of bites to achieve your nutrition goals. It’s not as simple as just eating cucumbers and carrots though - you’ll need proteins and carbs too, so that you don’t end up hungry and go over your bite limit with midnight snacks. Too much sugar and caffeine to keep your energy up and you’ll get a migraine (which is a brilliant interactioin between the Energy and Food mechanics) and if you just opt for junk you’ll find you’re still not satisfied. You can try special diets, and you can exercise if you go over your bites, but there’s also only so much time in a day and you only have so much energy.
Exercise will go a long way towards meeting your goals, and it’s a great idea if like me, the food mini game was your biggest struggle. (How like life!) But it takes a lot of energy to get all those sweet gains, and well, you’re not the biggest fan of it, so it can drain your mood. The exercise mini games consist of several variations of a sort of ‘yoga’ with the most noodly, unruly body you can possibly imagine, and that first experience with the exercise mechanic in Consume Me was honestly the first time it really got its hooks in me, and got a huge laugh out of me. Why? Well - exercising in Consume me means flinging incredibly unwieldy, yet somehow heavy arms and legs in one direction or another until they hit the “poses” being displayed on the screen. This particular mechanic is absolutely perfect - because if you try TOO hard, you’ll overshoot, and if you don’t flail significantly enough, you’ll just sink into a puddle at the bottom of the screen. But even if you do succeed, you’ll look ridiculous THE WHOLE TIME.
Similarly, there’s shortcuts to success. You can buy a scrub daddy to let you clean things faster and get more chore money. That chore money can buy you snacks, dietary plans, clothes with special benefits, or energy drinks that let you complete more tasks each day. That’ll come in super handy, as every time the game progresses, you seem to get even more busy, with relationships, college applications, and more tugging at the strings of your sanity.
Studying? You need to do a LOT of that, but make sure you don’t have any distractions. You can squeeze some in on the bus or in the lunchroom, but it’ll be harder to concentrate. Exercise a lot? Now you’re broke, because there’s no energy left to clean. Difficulty ramps up pretty quickly, and new mechanics are introduced regularly, while earlier tasks become more difficult - for example, when moving to your dorm means you can’t get money for chores from Mom anymore.
Here’s the thing - the relationship with me and this game was almost problematic.
Hsiao does such a good job of making hings that seem hard or take a lot of effort in real life feel that way mechanically, and the panic of never being able to do everything that’s on your To Do list is so real that it triggered anxiety and my adhd in a big way.
But I couldn't stop playing.
Consume Me gives you a few choices when you come to the end of one of its chapters and fail:
Do you level up when you fail and start over with a bit more experience and potentially some advantages, or do you just go back a day without the benefit of what you’ve learned.
Will anything help?
If you happen to be playing the game for review, how long can you play this game before you should really move on even if you haven’t beaten it?
Is it FUN?
You try so hard, and you just can't stop. But Consume Me can be incredibly frustrating.
Was it worth it?
I refuse to spoiler you on exactly how it all ends if you do make it through all the chapters, except to say this: If you expend effort the way I did, it'll profoundly affect you
It’ll teach you hard lessons about yourself.
And it will NEVER leave your mind.
Honestly? That IS the sort of game I want to play. And I think it’s a good one for just about anyone to try, too.
Six years ago, it was apparent there was something beautiful and special about this game, but I never could have guessed it’d be one of my most profound experiences in gaming to date. All this time, and it was all worth the wait to see how it all turned out.
You can find Consume Me on Steam now. And you should.