Consume Me Turns Gaming’s Obsession With Stats Into A Trap For Players
A life sim with a dark twist.
Despite their name, life sims tend to only simulate the positive side of life, or at least some idealized version of the actually complicated parts. But life, tragically, is about more than tending a perfect garden and flirting with your neighbors. Fresh off a grand prize win at this year’s Independent Games Festival, one upcoming life sim takes on a much darker subject in its new demo.
To say it outright, Consume Me is a game about disordered eating. It approaches the subject with care, avoiding triggers like calorie counts and specific diet plans, but it’s likely to conjure a lot of uncomfortable feelings in players who’ve been through that particular wringer themselves.
Consume Me uses lighthearted minigames to tackle and extremely tough subject.
In Consume Me, you play as a teenage girl named Jenny, who’s hit early on with a one-hit combo of body-related anxiety when her mom tells her she needs to lose weight and she finds out about a beach party where her crush will be in attendance. Her mom’s callous comment and the omnipresent pressure to meet ridiculous beauty standards pushes Jenny to start a crash diet, which you’ll have to guide her through.
It’s a dark premise, and one that could easily be a flop in the wrong hands. Fortunately, Consume Me’s development team tackles the idea with a mix of tenderness and humor, and as a note at the beginning of the demo says, the consequences of Jenny’s fixation on her weight don’t come until later in the game.
In the hour or so covered by the demo, you’re introduced to a series of WarioWare-esque minigames that make up Jenny’s day and the life sim elements that govern them. You need to manage your levels of energy, happiness, and hunger, with every action you take during the day filling or draining those resources.
Jenny’s physical and mental health struggles are the core of Consume Me.
Every day, Jenny starts with a meal, stacking blocks in specific patterns to fill her stomach without overeating. She needs to cover a number of marked spaces on a grid to satisfy her hunger, with penalties for leaving any uncovered. But everything she eats adds “bites,” which essentially stand in for calories, and if she goes over a limit of 500 bites, she’ll need to exercise to burn them off to succeed at her diet. Workouts come with their own minigame — one of the best in the demo — where you need to quickly drag Jenny’s arms to match poses displayed on screen.
Balancing all of Jenny’s happiness and energy with her desire to lose weight and meet the other goals she has set out for the week can be difficult. She also needs to do chores for her mom, save up money for a swimsuit, and gain enough skills to impress her crush at the party. At times, she’s just keeping her head above water, balancing all the responsibilities and demands placed on any teenager by themselves, their parents, and the crushing need to fit in.
Fun minigames contrast with Consume Me’s dark premise.
About halfway through the demo, I finally hit my stride. I’d read enough books to increase my skills, which made dieting and exercise easier. I had energy drinks and snacks on hand to balance my meters, and almost enough money saved up to buy that swimsuit. Sure, my happiness meter was in the red, but as long as I hit my goals, that didn’t really matter.
Then, I had a disastrous meal one morning, getting a plate full of blocks that just didn’t fit right, sending my bite counter way above diet range. I panicked, and spent the rest of the day exercising to get that counter down where I needed it to be. I was ecstatic. I’d beaten the odds to hit my target despite my earlier screw-up, and that’s when it hit me. Consume Me did just what it set out to do, putting me in Jenny’s head, where destroying your own mental health and even your body to meet its arbitrary standards feels like a victory, even when you know it’s wrong. That night, with my happiness meter tanked, the only way to recover it was to gobble down a snack before bed. After all that, I still failed my diet for the day.
