Trigger warning: Discussion🅰s of disordered eating. has been on my wishlist since before I even really knew what it w𒆙as about. I noticed it’d been nominated for awards at a bunch of games festivals, won some of them, and that its Steam page description said, “did you feel stupid, fat, lazy, and ugly in high school? well i did...but at least i made a life-simulation RPG about it!” I did feel stupid, fat, lazy, and ugly in high school! That’s enough for me.
Wait, Is This ****ing Game About Us?
After playing the demo however, it suddenly hit me exactly how catered this game is to me and my specific experiences. Protagonist Jenny is on summer break before entering her final year of high school, but even without school to attend, there’s a lot for her to do. Every day is split into a series of relatively mundane tasks, like getting ready, having lunch, and free time to do whatever else, like studying (which increases your skills), chores (which your mother pays you for doing – must be nice), practicing putting on makeup, exercising, or lying on the couch and futzing with her phone all day. It’s a life sim, alright.
But what Jenny’s thinking most about is dieting. At the start of the game, Jenny is piling food onto her plate for lunch when her mother starts nagging her about eating too much, telling her (partly in Mandarin Chinese) that she’s lazy, her face is too round, and that nobody will ever want to marry her. Jenny goes to her room and looks in the mirror and decides that her mother’s right: she needs to lose some weight. She’s therefore putting herself on a strict diet of 500♛ bites (an arbitrary unit used to avoid the word “calories”, according to the demo), and if sꩲhe goes over that, she has to exercise the excess away.
As someone who had a Chinese mother who sometimes complained that I was lazy and called me ‘moon face’ as a term of endearment when I was a teenager, I was astounded at how closely this game adhered to my own experience of adolescence. At some point during my childhood, I’d also looked in the mirror and decided I didn’t like my body, and would therefore change it through pure willpower. My eating disorder also began with rigid calorie cou💞nting and exercising. I learned to tolerate hunger so that I could have the satisfaction of hitting my weight goals. I call💖ed it delayed gratification.
Gamification Is A Slippery Slope
Everything in Consume Me is cleverly translated into minigames. Planning out a meal is a process of putting 🐼Tetris-like pieces of food together on a board, trying to minimise your bites while maximising your fullness. Exercising is an ordeal of dragging your f🎃loppy body around so it hits the right positions. Folding laundry is a matter of timing folds so your clothes fit nicely into a box. Studying is a matter of keeping your swinging head in view of the book you’re reading, all while avoiding distractions.
It’s this gamification that ingeniously translates the insidiousness of eating disorders and rigid routines to the medium of video games. Calorie🧸 counting apps often gamify reaching your arbitrary goals for you – that’s why . I, too, gamified my routines when I was in the throes of that illness. If I exercised, I’d treat myself to an extra, tiny snack. If I stuck to my calorie goal for a certain number of days, I’d buy myself a new book. I used habit trackers. I put everything on a to-do list in my bullet journal so I could tick it off for maximum satisfaction.
You want to win when you play a video game. That’s the whole point. In this case, winning means watching Jenny slowly, but surely, slide into a disorder that takes over her brain, making it so that everything she does is in service of a wider goal of being loved, being valued, being seen as more because she’s made herself less. She learns skills so her crush will find her more interesting. She puts on makeup so she’ll be prettier. She does chores so she can b🐬uy a new swimsuit. She loses weight so she’ll feel less disgusting.
In the demo, at least, all this hasn’t quite come to the forefront. I know from the 🅺note added by the developer that Je🍷nny does develop an eating disorder through this initial diet, but in the week and a half you play through in this slice of the game, it’s still fun and games.
The game’s description says it has “over 13 possible endings: most of them bad!”, which, well, is kind of just being a teenager. This kind of thing never really lets go of you. I had to stop counting my macros years ago, when I realised that I was slipping into my teenage tendencies, allowing myself no room for flexibility or just eating to enjoy my food. I think I found the😼 good ending, though yo🙈u kind of have to keep it up all your life for it to be an ending. I eat ‘normally’, as far as eating normally is possible for someone like me. I hope I can help Jenny find her good ending too, when the full game is launched in September. .
168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Consume Me
- Released
- September 25, 2025
- Developer(s)
- Jenny Jiao Hsia, AP Thomson, Jie En Lee, Violet W-P, Ken "♕;coda" Snyder
- Publisher(s)
- 🐻 Hexecutable♉
- Number of Players
- Single-player
- Steam Deck Compatibility
- Unknown
- PC Release Date
- September 25, 2025
