[Disclaimer: Consume Me is a game that explores a lot of topics that could be sensitive to some people. This includes eating disorders, body dysmorphia, family trauma, and religion. This review will discuss these topics as they are portrayed in the game.]
There have been numerous games that have explored mental health issues spanning many genres and themes. The Hellblade series explores psychosis, while God of War looks at generational trauma and its burden. Consume Me is the first game I’ve played that takes on eating disorders, however. It is also a semi-autobiographical story about the main developer, Jenny Jiao Hsia, and her experiences growing up. It is very bold to put yourself out there as much as this game does and to be so open about your own traumas.
In the end, I just wish the game were actually enjoyable to play.
Under Pressure
Consume Me stars Jenny, a high school student with an overbearing mother and an eating disorder. Jenny also has a crush on a classmate and neighbor, Oliver, whom she has been pining over. After being chastised by her mother for eating too much, Jenny decides to go on an intensive diet. You, as the player, must help Jenny balance her daily routine in a Persona-esque structure where you have a limited number of actions you can take per day until you have to go to bed. Do you want to spend time exercising? Or maybe you can go to the bookstore to pick up a book on dieting that will increase your diet skills? There is actually a surprising amount of options you will open up as you progress the game, and a decent amount of skills that Jenny has that you need to level to reach certain milestones that the game lays out before you.
Exercise is one of the main activities you will be participating in throughout the game. You will have to click on Jenny and move her body to match the pose that is prompted. This is amusing for a little bit as you figure out how Jenny’s body moves as you stretch and distort her body to match these poses. This mini-game started to wear out its welcome fast, so I was pretty happy when I unlocked a new exercise for Jenny fairly quickly. However, that happiness immediately turned to disappointment when I discovered that no matter what exercise you choose, it would always be the same mini-game.
Therein lies the main issue with Consume Me: It just isn’t a fun game to play. You’ll spend day after day doing the same mini-games over and over again with very little variety. I understand that this is part of the point, as Jenny is trying to get into a routine and find how to balance her life, but even if it is contextualized, it still isn’t fun.
The other main mini-game you will play is when Jenny has to eat or prepare a meal. You will have to fit multiple food items into patterns on a grid to try to cover up all of Jenny’s hunger points without going over her “bites”, which are essentially calories. This is one of the most unfun mini-games in Consume Me and, unfortunately, the mini-game you will play most often. There is next to no variety in how this game is played, and despite attempting to throw in curveballs with different meal types (protein-heavy meals, lighter meals, etc.), you are essentially doing the same thing over and over again ad nauseam while dealing with Jenny’s diet.
There are other activities with mini-games attached to them such as walking your dog, where you time your clicks to switch off pivoting from Jenny and her dog’s position to move forward as much as possible, to get a little exercise while also getting allowance for your chores and doing laundry, which you have to time your clicks to properly fold your clothes, so you can continue to wear your outfits that give you boosts to the skills and activities you are wanting to improve. Just like exercising and meal prep, these mini-games become repetitive and tedious to perform. I think a lot of this could have been remedied by shortening the game length considerably. Six hours sounds like a short time, but when you spend the large majority of it doing these menial tasks and mini-games, it feels like an eternity.
Personal Belief
Religion isn’t a topic foreign to video games. There have been many games over the years that have depictions of religion with a wide variety of beliefs. It isn’t often you have a game that embraces a specific religion and promotes it as brazenly as Consume Me, however. There is not really any talk of religion for the first two-thirds of the game, besides a brief exchange between Jenny and Oliver where Oliver mentions that his mother is religious. There is a huge, and somewhat jarring, moment that occurs late in the game where Jenny is invited to go to church with a friend and has a religious awakening while listening to a sermon. This then allows Jenny to get a small boost and overcome mental blocks that occur after studying by praying.
Putting aside any of my own beliefs and relationship with religion, this tonal shift left me feeling slightly uncomfortable. Not because the game has a push for one specific religion, but how this message is introduced and incorporated into the game. It feels incredibly jarring and not earned whatsoever. I know it is just a video game and there are far worse things games have you participate in than religious practice, but most of those games make it very clear what you are getting into before you play the game. There is nowhere in the marketing or store pages for Consume Me that signals that this game has heavy religious themes in it.
This can lead to some who have a difficult or adverse relationship with some religions being forced to engage in their practices through gameplay that they are not comfortable doing, and with no prior warning that this would be a part of the game. Consume Me almost seems to want to surprise the player with this revelation, just as Jenny is surprised by her spiritual awakening. Despite the surprise, this inclusion could have been worthwhile, but it falls flat in the end and doesn’t handle the topic with the grace such a sensitive topic deserves.
In the End
Consume Me is such a complicated game to talk about. It takes a lot of courage for someone to make a game that puts themselves square in the middle of it and doesn’t hold back in their lowest moments or personal beliefs. That being said, I feel like Consume Me would have worked better if it were half the length, cut out the mini-games, and veered more into the visual novel genre. As a video game, it just fails to feel rewarding or fun to play, and narratively, it fails to resolve its story and themes in a satisfying way.
If a game is willing to explore such complex and difficult topics, it needs to be prepared to tackle those topics head-on and say something. Instead, the game just sort of ends without any resolution or final thoughts, and leaves the player wondering what the whole point of this was. I think there are some people out there who will connect with Jenny’s story more than I did and be able to overlook the monotonous gameplay, but in the end, Consume Me just left me feeling numb to the experience as a whole.
Disclaimer: Hexecutable provided a PC (Steam) copy of Consume Me for review purposes.
