Consume Me review — A tasty yet tough bite to eat

Life as a teen going into adulthood can be a pretty rough time. There’s a lot of self-discovery to be done and your future and career to think of whilst combating the insecurities that come alongside all of them. There’s immense pressure to have everything figured out before you even hit your 20s, so it’s no wonder the current generation has hit an all-time low when it comes to mental health. It’s more important than ever to recognize what’s unhealthy and unrealistic, and Consume Me is a wonderful indie title that highlights how these toxicities can fade within the norm, painted over with colorful cartoons and slapstick humor.

Rightly so, Consume Me immediately hits you with a few trigger warnings for the content it’s going to talk about—mainly dieting and calorie culture in young Asian girls and the pressure inflicted on them by their mothers to go to the top universities. It alleviates the pressure by replacing ‘calories’ with ‘bites,’ but the game is constantly glossing over the harm in strict dieting by making it into a cartoony sketch.

If you’ve made it past the warnings, then prepare yourself for a hilarious adventure through the life of protagonist Jenny. A young girl trying to survive her last year in high school and her future ventures in university. Consume Me is split into chapters, and each focuses on a rather key event in Jenny’s life that spans across a week. At the start of each week, you’re given a to-do list by your rather harsh reflection and also a bunch of other things to do. Like most of us, you’re your own worst critic, as Jenny’s summer isn’t spent having fun but following dieting plans, exercising, studying, and appeasing the wrath of her mother. It’s up to the player to help Jenny achieve these goals and micro-manage the hell out of her day.

This is Consume Me’s main gameplay loop, with each day split into events for Jenny to undertake. You’ll choose an outfit for the day, prepare lunch, engage in random events, and then have a set amount of activity points to use in your free time before going to bed. You typically get 2 activity points, with more arduous tasks like aerobic exercises and doing laundry costing 2 points, whilst reading and walking the dog cost only 1. As you find yourself needing to balance more tasks, you’ll get options to get more activity points, but they are costly. You are always pushed for time, with frustration spilling when you realize how limited your time is—how relatable. By the third or fourth day, I’d find myself panicking about managing all my tasks, which was easier in the first couple of chapters but gets way harder when you approach your college applications. That sense of dread and panic is core to Consume Me, but never feels truly hopeless, as the game does an amazing job with its comedy and presentation.

Before I gush about this, though, I want to dive more into gameplay. Alongside managing your time through activity points, you’ll also have to keep an eye on your three gauges, consisting of Guts, Energy, and Mood. Each will diminish and increase through specific activities, and there will be dire consequences if you neglect even one. In later chapters, I found my Guts and Energy gauge at a constant low, which resulted in Jenny’s inability to complete other tasks.

 One of Consume Me’s biggest challenges is controlling what Jenny has for food each day, the result affecting her Guts gauge. Whether she’s at home or in school, you’ll have to play a lunch mini-game that resembles Tetris. You’ll get a grid with taste-bud spots that need to all be filled in for Jenny to be satisfied and not lose Guts. Each food puzzle piece you place contributes to a certain number of bites, with Jenny’s diet limit being 450. If you go over this, you’ll need to find a way to burn them, or you’ll ‘fail’ that dieting day, and it’ll cost ½ cheat day. Get too many failed days and … I’m not actually sure what happens, as I never found the game too challenging in that regard, but I’m guessing it’ll be a negative outcome.

This is where the trigger warnings really come in, as the game treats dieting and eating as a minigame for Jenny to play, rather than prioritizing the nutrients she needs. If she indulges too much, characters will call her out on it, which always makes me angry and upset.

Whilst doing activities, you’ll see that Consume Me has an RPG-esque skill system that comprises 4 skills for Jenny to level up—including Athletics, Chores, Diet, and Academics. The game warns you not to neglect any one of these skills and to keep a balance as each becomes relevant in each chapter. In a particularly taxing chapter, if I hadn’t been putting points into each skill, I would have hit a hard wall and found myself maybe wanting to reset.

Half of Consume Me’s fun is ironically organizing Jenny’s life and making sure she’s on top of everything she wants to get done. Despite a relaxed start, I really had to stop and think before I did any task in later chapters. I even made different save files so I could reset my week if I needed to—which definitely happened once or twice. Consume Me is so addictive in its gameplay and always has something new to upset your day or make it even better.

Random events occur once in Jenny’s day, and there are a few you can encounter. They can either be lucky, like finding money on the street, or negative, like a bus driving through a puddle, prompting you to change your outfit. Speaking of outfits, Jenny’s wardrobe is stacked full of adorable options that bring consequences to what you do that day. You’ll collect outfits that decrease the activity points needed to do exercise or ones that help her read a book faster. You got these through rewards for leveling up, etc., and it was a fun adventure to 100% completion. I won’t go on and on, but Consume Me is full of bits and bobs that reward you in different ways and keep gameplay fresh and interesting, from a bunch of minigames to bonus activities you can acquire.

I can’t believe I just go on and on about Consume Me’s gameplay when we haven’t even touched on its style and animation. It is so unbearably delightful that Consume Me’s deep messaging and harrowing moments were all made hilarious by aesthetics dripping in style and fun. You play the game like it’s a comic strip, with panels that swoop past when Jenny’s getting ready for school and dramatic anime expressions when something goes wrong, or my favorite, when she has a successful gym session.

Despite a repetitive day and night cycle, I never got bored with Consume Me’s delightful storytelling. For such a narrative-driven game, it is the essence of interactive storytelling and how stories can be told so innovatively through gameplay. Even if you’re not moving a character or exploring but just filtering through menus and looking at panels, Consume Me has the player constantly interacting with actions. This can be the use of your mouse to drag the bed covers off Jenny, changing her eye direction to 5 bucks on the floor, or flinging arms around so Jenny can kiss her boyfriend. I felt involved every step of the way, and Consume Me held me in its grip from start to finish.

My only negative was when I wanted to transition from playing Consume Me on my PC with a mouse and keyboard to my Steam Deck. I was excited as it had been verified for the handheld console, but as I tried to tackle a chapter, I frustratingly gave up as the control; the input felt a bit janky. A lot of Consume Me’s mini games are dragging things around and clicking through menus, which doesn't translate seamlessly to the controller. The gym mini game especially felt rough, and I went from being successful in the mini game to failing it every time. This game feels perfect on PC, but if it gets ported to Switch or other consoles, I’d want to see some revisions to make the experience smoother.