Review InnuendoStudios 5/5 · Jul 12, 2026
discovered in my rain world review that the spoiler tag deletes line breaks unless you put them on each paragraph separately, which I'm not gonna do, so let's just leave it that consume me is a game you might not wanna be spoiled on and, if so, you should decide when and where you wanna bow out of this blurb-posing-as-review. …
discovered in my rain world review that the spoiler tag deletes line breaks unless you put them on each paragraph separately, which I'm not gonna do, so let's just leave it that consume me is a game you might not wanna be spoiled on and, if so, you should decide when and where you wanna bow out of this blurb-posing-as-review.
playing this after playing titanium court and, separately, becoming a tim rogers fan, feels like completing a trifecta. consume me lead dev and also protagonist, jenny jiao hsia, is a periodic guest star in tim's videos/central figure in tim's life, referred to primarily as "mimsy," and titanium court is made by consume me's codeveloper, a.p. thomson; both these men appear as themselves - a.p. explicitly, tim obliquely - in the playable end credits that are also the final chapter of the game. (the independent game festival awards have this tradition where the seamus mcnally grand prize is always presented by the previous year's winner, which means this year jenny presented it to a.p.). I have bluntly discovered the trigonometry of influence these three have on each other.
it is weird to say, but consume me - a game largely about disordered eating and broadly about anxiety - is the least neurotic of the three. consume me is playful. consume me has a goofy, floppy sense of humor. consume me commits to a mechanical diegesis in which systems are not purely textural devices, narrative does not take primacy, you can fail and will have to start over, and yet still does not take its mechanics that seriously. it is having some fun with itself. titanium court is fun and also fiddly - it finds its fun in fiddliness - which makes me see it behind my eyelids while getting lost in its maximalist-tetris universe. meanwhile tim's idea of "fun" is doing the absolute most until he has an only semi-performative nervous breakdown and driving himself to repeated, literal health crises from working years of 14-hour days. genuinely cannot fathom how jenny's memoir about e.d. and dropping out of college seems lower stakes than a.p.'s tower defense game about faerie courts and tim's review of fucking pac-man.
ok enough talking jenny by talking about white guys associated with her: consume me is a midpoint between warioware and nina freeman's cibele, without just being anna anthropy's dys4ia. you play a high school girl named jenny jiao hsia whose mother shames her about her weight until she starts dieting, and trying to juggle the diet with chores and summer reading homework and social engagements. each activity is tied to an end-of-week goal - first past the prologue/tutorial is a beach party a cute boy will be attending, and she wants to look good in a bathing suit - with benchmarks of tasks that must be accomplished in time, with targets of properly-portioned meals, pages read, makeup skills mastered, allowance earned, and maximum allowable cheat days. each task is tied, variably, to three primary resources: mood, energy, and guts ("fullness," but also, in a sense, nerve). time is also a resource, with different tasks taking different quantities of time. each activity is tied to its own minigame: properly-portioning a plate is a block-arrangement game where you have to cover all the hunger squares but not too many of the empty squares and each piece is valued as a certain number of "bites," and there is maximum-bite par, the most conveniently-shaped pieces often carry the highest bite-count; it is very easy to use too many calorically-dense pieces while also failing to cover all the hunger squares, thereby both blowing your diet and still being hungry. exercise (done to burn excess "bites") is a wobbly game of yoga that plays like octodad (is octodad even the reference anymore? it's goat simulator now, isn't it? oh god, it's actually I am bread, right? or is it something else I don't even know now??); it looks like the opening credits of after yang and makes me smile every time. walking the dog is a game of spin doctor. (ok none of you know spin doctor unless you were a very specific age at a school school with a very specific computer lab, but if that's you, you know exactly what I mean; you also know the magic candle.) each successive chapter has new games and tweaks on the old ones, striking a very careful balance: they are tuned such that each can be played better but none can really be mastered. it is frankly remarkable that a good two dozenish minigames all strike that careful balance.
the other balance they have to strike is being fun and just slightly unsettling. that is the real kicker: being good at consume me feels not quite good. it never feels bad, which would be the easy route: this is not spec ops: the line for bulimics. I kinda like the plate-sorting minigame, and, instead of hating myself for liking it, I just feel kinda... weird about it. feeling just-kinda-weird is, in many ways, harder to achieve than making the player hate themself. gamers already hate themselves. getting them to hit a target they know they probably shouldn't be targeting, to want to hit it but, like, maybe not hit it too well, to get good enough at the minigame to meet criteria without perfectly starving jenny, is a tightrope and a half. even the ostensibly fine-and-healthy challenges, like walking the dog, or doing the laundry, have the added stress of trying to maximize allowance or meet mrs. hsia's exacting standards. each has been gamified, jane mcgonigal'd, like every part of jenny's life is a habitica quest, and nothing can really serve as its own reward. you can't just play the funny yoga game, you have "bites" to burn and there is a timer.
I don't know how, but she makes it look easy.
the other easy route would be making the game didactically unwinnable. each chapter adds more stressors, first when jenny returns to school and takes the sat's and then when she goes to college and tries to ace her classes well enough to transfer to her boyfriends ivy. and you can see the potential gearing-up for the systems to become impossible, to drive home the point that this degree of perfectionism is inhuman. but, again: no! if you fail challenges, even in the final chapter where it's apollo-pummeling-you-with-a-dodgeball obvious that jenny's about to crash the absolute shitfuck out, you will get a game over, and you will have to replay the chapter. the final challenge is doable, if you know how to optimize: it isn't doable without a lot of energy drinks, a lot of exercise that is also homework thanks to audiobooks, a lot of homework that is also exercise thanks to a standing desk, a lot of late nights to extend study hours, a lot of cheat-snacks to improve your mood and then more exercise to burn off the "bites" that added to your diet and then more coffee to get back the time spent exercising. (you also have to literally find jesus.) point is: it can be done, and there is a certain pleasure in moving the pieces around just so, somehow managing to get the final two mission-critical tasks done on the very last turn of the last day before deadline. but, fuck, who would want to play the game at that level forever? who would want a life like that?
the not-easy route consume me takes is this: none of jenny's targets ever matter. she spends the summer trying to lose weight so she'll look good in a bathing suit, and then the beach party is rained out, and she and the boy she likes end up on the same train back, soaked, and hit it off anyway. she spends her first semester back at school competing with a girl and trying to keep her boyfriend interested even though college has turned them long-distance, and it turns out the girl wasn't even trying to compete with her and her boyfriend says he's not gonna lose interest if they don't text every night. she crams for the sat's and still gets waitlisted at cornell. and, after mastering her absolutely unhinged set of self-inflicted tasks to try and get transferred to her boyfriend's school, he breaks up with her. none of it actually matters, it doesn't accomplish anything, for reasons none of her systems can meaningfully affect. if you're imagining a heavy game where a person starves herself until she's too weak and thin to stand upright, this is not that game: her character sprite does not change shape. she doesn't even get visibly thinner.
that, I think, is what impresses me most. the gentleness of it. if you know anything about eating disorders, you know that they are, primarily, about control. but, even knowing that, I still expected a game about eating disorders to culminate in losing weight, and consume me doesn't. it's actually about control. it's about the way jenny thinks that these intense goals she's set for herself, and the many destructive habits with which she meets them, mild-in-isolation but catastrophic-in-totality, really have no impact on the things they are meant to address. last-minute cramming does not get you into cornell. two-week diets do not radically change your body's equilibrium. trying to satisfy your mother will not make you a good doctor. reading an impressive, 700-page novel you don't actually enjoy does not impress your boyfriend's mother. all the systems in the world can't keep your 18-year-old boyfriend from moving on when he lives upstate and you're still in the city. the things you do control have no effect on the things you wish you controlled.
I will stop short of spoiling the ending, but the gentleness continues, even past the inevitable crashout. and I think I needed that. I think games needed that. the ending is not dramatic, and finds a way to make the mundanity of life shockingly uplifting, a gradual process that takes a decade presented as a firework. letting go is a process, not an event, but every step of that process, tiny though it is, is cause for celebration. a life getting steadily better.
she makes that look easy, too, while being very clear: it isn't.
but it's good.
