Consume Me

It is a beautiful autobiographical game.

Perfect Game

I heard about this game through the NoClip podcast and was primarily intrigued because it was basically the format of a game I myself created a prototype for back in 2018. Inspired by UnderTale, I wanted to create something of a real life simulator, based around minigames that would get easier or harder based on the character's mental state - touching on themes of fantasy, the wonders of indulging in it and the dangers of retreating too far into it. On a mechanical level, Consume Me is far more crystalised realisation of my prototype. Not only are the minigames fun in and of themselves (and can be quite challenging), the balancing of how demands are placed on you incrementally is superb. Despite this being an autographical piece about being a teenager under a lot of pressure, I routinely linked the sensation of trying to balance TOO MANY PRIORITIES to my adult life and its competing obligations, which meant I identified strongly to Jenny's experience. Ludonarrative etc. etc. The mechanic of "bites" being linked to how many calories Jenny can eat is an ever present worry, and I think Consume Me manages to effectively communicate the disordered nature of viewing food numerically. When constructing lunches in the "lunch building" minigame, leaving spaces may keep yo under your "bites" limit for the day, but you lose a huge amount of 'Guts' which really hamstrings your ability to perform tasks later on in the day. Snacking late at night because you don't have enough energy to study is EXACTLY the kind of thing that mechanically puts you in the shoes of the protagonist. People with a history of disordered eating should tread with caution engaging with the game, but I paradoxically think they are the people who would get the most out of it. As someone who has had a disordered relationship with food, I felt very 'seen' playing this game, and I reflected after playing how easy it was for me to just take it as a given to have days where my "bite" count was well below the daily limit and I left Jenny starving. The fact I did that so easily gave me pause - only a good piece of art could make me question my own behaviour like that. The visuals are charming, the animation is expressive and snippy, the writing serves the story being told (and combined with the visuals is occasionally very funny), and the mechanics are well balanced. I think this is a very good game. But because it's so good, I see some missed potential. If you want to avoid spoilers the TLDR is this: in general, I think this is definitely more of an enthusiast game, but I can very much see a casual player enjoying their time and being made to think. It's well worth the price of admission, so give it a go. *********SPOILERS******* IMO, it doesn't go far enough. When I heard the description of the game, I assumed the game would eventually build to a point where the POV character would be putting so much pressure on themselves and be setting so many impossible goals for themselves, that it would eventually be impossible to complete, and the player character would then have to suffer the consequences of not being able to fulfil all the tasks. The game had been building to this moment nicely: adding more goals week by week, chapter by chapter, that really made you have to think about how you solved the problem of keeping all these plates spinning. But in the last chapter, you maybe have 5 minutes of gameplay where that's the case. 5 minutes of gameplay where you, as the player, FEEL like everything is overwhelming and impossible. You see that the character in her lowest emotional moment, but it's more shown to you in small interactive vignettes rather than as part of regular gameplay. There was so much room here to have the player suffer real gameplay consequences to being overwhelmed, and have the characters' life circumstances affect core gameplay in a profound way. They did this briefly, but in my mind not anywhere near far enough. I felt like I wanted to hit rock bottom with Jenny, not watch Jenny hit rock bottom and then timeskip to the end. I wanted to feel overwhelmed with her, hit her darkest moment when she can't do ANYTHING and then see her gradually, bit by bit, day by day, grow out of it. In the epilogue, Jenny (the developer whose life the game is based on) talks about how she just kind of stopped tracking calories after a while and moved to a more "normal" way of eating. Show us that through gameplay!!! That would have been so valuable for people to see!! Maybe the goals could have been stripped away day by day, or made more generous. We, as the player, could get rewarded for doing more enjoyable things and fewer stressful or demanding things until Jenny recovered. We could have had our energy and mood nerfed while this happened. There was so much room to tell the story through the gameplay, and I felt it didn’t go anywhere near as far as it could. All of the above might sound negative, but it’s not. I don’t write reviews on Steam - I’m writing this because it deserves my time and attention and is a compelling work of art. This is a very good game, made with real skill and I want to see where this team goes next, because Consume Me has so much room to grow.