REVIEW: Authenticity, charm, and empathy make Consume Me one of 2025's best
- Nate Hermanson
- Sep 24
- 8 min read
Content note: Discussions of dieting and fatphobia.
I grew up in a Filipino family that had quite the fixation on weight, despite the simultaneous obsession with food. Whenever I walked into a family party, a chorus of "oh! Pudgy boy is here!" would echo outward. It was my fun little nickname in the family, something I embraced at the time and chose to take as something fun. Giggling as aunties poked at my stomach and commented on how chubby I was. But it was years later when I realized how much it messed up my relationship with my own body and with food.
All that to say, I was kind of innately prepared and given an unfair buff when playing the semi-autobiographical slice-of-life narrative game that is Consume Me. And it's also why nearly every aspect of this game resonated so strongly for me to call it one of the best games I've played all year.
Nearly a decade in the making, Consume Me is semi-autobiographical in that it tells Jenny Jiao Hsia's adolescent story, or some approximation of it. It stars Jenny's family and friends, and pulls verbatim from moments in her life. It pulls from real emotions that every person involved in the game's creation likely felt at some point and from the experiences they shared together, both in making this game and in existing around each other.
It's a special project from a team of folks with tons of tiny games, student projects, and mobile games under their belt.
Consume Me takes us back to the dark times: 2011. Jenny (the character) is going into her senior year of high school, suddenly taken by an obsession with her weight, her image, and... most importantly, her crush. With a prompting into perfection from her mom (and society), Jenny finds herself loaded with a slate of impossible goals by the most intense taskmaster possible: her own reflection.
Jenny's mirrored self is quick to point out every flaw, grimacing at how her fleshy form looks and how little discipline she has in accomplishing everything she needs to so that she's able to have the life she's always wanted. Together, the duo sets a strict agenda for Jenny to follow to achieve all her goals. Diet to keep your bites low (the world's replacement for calories), chores to keep your money up, and social obligations to slowly woo your crush to your side. And it all must be accomplished this summer to set herself up for the best senior year possible.
Except, once the summer ends, the work only gets harder. Every milestone, every life moment, only creates more work for Jenny and her reflection in their pursuit of perfection.
What makes Jenny's journey work — because I know some of you are probably reeling from the trauma of it all — is its laissez-faire silliness. In much the same way our online generation copes with the near-weekly emotional damages we've endured for the past decade, Jenny goofs her way through situations she can almost see wrecking her in real-time. When she's melting on the couch while listening to her mother's latest batch of criticisms, depicted literally in the game's pitch perfect art design, you laugh, cry, and wince all in the same breath.
It's relatable in ways that you may not even realize at first. It's easy in retrospect to admonish Jenny's relationship with food and with herself, leaning back in your chair with a "silly Jenny, that's an unhealthy belief!" ready at the hip. But if you really let yourself transport into her shoes, or into a past (or present) version of you that feels misaligned with the expectations placed on you, you completely understand how and why the tendrils of perfectionism take root in her mind — and, probably at some point, did in yours too.
Just like Jenny learns over time, Consume Me is about so much more than food. It's about coming into your own. It's about learning those brutal life lessons that help define the rest of your life.
Consume Me is the definition of a coming-of-age story, and it might be one of the best versions I've seen in games, because of how effective its empathetic storytelling is. Everyone can relate to being an awkward teen, trying to figure out how to grow into themselves while keeping up with the unruly demands of society. It distills that clumsy teen energy into tiny bite-sized chapters, taking somewhere between 5-6 hours to finish your first playthrough as you witness key moments in Jenny's life from high school and beyond. And her story is built brick-by-brick out of moments that perfectly encapsulate modern adolescence, because it's built out of and based on IRL Jenny's reality, giving it a feeling of authenticity that carries through the entire experience.
Consume Me's tale of growth works effectively, and a big reason is how it blends its narrative seamlessly into its gameplay. Defined in the game as "an interactive comic book stitched together with fun contextual minigames," Consume Me kind of stands on its own with no real parallels to point to. Florence, a 2018 emotional relationship-focused story filled to the brim with bespoke minigames that help tell its story, is probably the closest comparison I have — and even then it's not quite right.
Consume Me blends that form of storytelling with its own dash of silliness and Sims-like meter management powered by randomized events and painfully fun gameplay experiences (considering the subject matter). The basic structure of each chapter sees Jenny facing down some kind of deadline. To be able to go to a party, she needs to do enough chores by the end of the week. College applications are due, which means getting teacher recommendations and studying for the SAT. And of course, the one persistent goal through all of this is to keep her bites under a specified limit, with dread-inducing weigh-ins to cap off each week.
It starts simple enough, with dieting your main and only goal early on, but soon the demands of a person on the brink of adulthood start to pile up. Each chapter comes with a list of main goals that you have to accomplish; then there is a batch of extra goals that you usually need to complete 3 or 4 of by the end of the week, but which ones you go after are up to you. All the while, you're managing Jenny's meters including hunger, mood, and energy.
As you progress, the game's complicated layering of challenges has you forcing Jenny into the most heinous nights of her life to be able to even get close to success. You'll have to dip into perfect time management skills and take full advantage of the game's Jenny-enhancing items to do things like add segments of time to your day (usually you have just two per day in Jenny's designated "free time") or fill certain meters more so that you're able to tackle some intensive task (like energy-exhausting exercises or mood-depleting study fests).
Near the end of the game, I had Jenny drink four coffees, three energy drinks, stay up until 2 a.m., and do a painful exercise, all to ensure she passed a test. I was awed at the ability to bypass the limitations of the human body to pull it off, but simultaneously reminded of the kinds of nights I spent doing exactly the same in my younger days.
As you progress, the game's complicated layering of challenges has you forcing Jenny into the most heinous nights of her life to be able to even get close to success ... Near the end of the game, I had Jenny drink four coffees, three energy drinks, stay up until 2 a.m., and do a painful exercise, all to ensure she passed a test.
Outside of the pure time management testing, there are a ton of bespoke minigames that fill out Consume Me in weirdly satisfying ways. There's the lunch minigame in which you haphazardly Tetris oddly shaped food blocks onto a grid, placing enough to satiate her hunger but keep the total number of bites under par. So, nearly impossible and illogical. Kinda like dieting.
Then there's the physics-based exercise minigame, in which you're tossing Jenny's head and limbs at targets on the screen to be "effective" with your motions. There's a dog-walking minigame where your dog swings in arcs down the street as you dodge poo piles and make sure to get your dog onto fire hydrants and mailboxes for critical pee-purtunities. How about trying on makeup, a minigame that sees you piecemeal painting on a "pretty Jenny" over a crispy just-woken up face while dodging the bugs that crawl across your mirror? It's all very WarioWare, very Mario Party. So, in other words, very fun.
Each minigame is filled with a feral energy, punctuated by silly animations when you "win" or "lose," infusing the game with a cheeky lightness to balance its darker topic. And they're always a bit harder to pull off than you think they'll be. Every action in the game comes with a trade-off, whether it saps your meters, eats away at your time, or even requires you to possess specific items before you're able to do them.
While it's full of humor and loosey goosey vibes, there's a meticulousness to Jenny's days as she chases her (often destructive) goals — which is the point. How your day will go traces back even to the moment you get dressed in the morning, as each of the adorable 'fits in Jenny's closet aligns with some core task: a chores outfit, complete with apron and bandana, that makes chores more profitable; an exercise getup that makes all workouts take one less unit of time; or a cute egg mascot-based fit that improves her mood.
The more you level up your skills in those tasks, the more unique abilities you unlock for Jenny, like the ability to study and exercise at the same time or to do an exercise that reduces your appetite and replenishes your "guts" meter.
It all feeds back into this loop of prioritizing and planning, reflecting the catastrophic mindset that goes into a young person's decision-making. If we didn't wear that outfit, didn't do that chore, or talk to that person on specific days, it'd all be over. Everything ties back to everything, informed by the decisions you made — so you'd better make the right ones. Consume Me's core structure is built to emulate that.
You'd think that the novelty could wear off over time. But between the ever-growing complications that require deeper planning as the game goes on and the unique chapter-based narrative sequences that surprise you with their emotional power, that never really comes true. Right when I started to feel the churn of the game loop in the game's final hours, Consume Me proceeded to deliver one of the game's best moments to me on a platter and ushered me toward the brilliant final third that's full of surprises and sealed the game as one of my favorites of the year, and maybe all time.
The brilliant final third that's full of surprises ... sealed Consume Me as one of my favorites of the year, and maybe all time.
Jenny, AP, Jie, Violet, and Ken provide a package so genuinely aligned in message, tone, and style that the experience hits in almost magical ways. Each of its crunchy-satisfying sound effects makes the minigames all the more enjoyable. The '90s vibey chiptune soundtrack from coda amplifies the chaos of our teenage try-hard's life up to 11. And Jenny and Jie's art is the sealing piece that makes the cutesy-chaotic charm of her complicated life so enjoyable to watch unfold.
Consume Me is a stunning achievement in transporting the player into another's shoes. And in remembering how impossibly rude we are to ourselves when we're young. It'll make you laugh, cry, and cringe. It'll test your patience and force you to reflect on the same kinds of life choices you make/have made/and will still make. It is the kind of art piece that uses all the trappings of the medium to transcend into something else entirely.
Video Games Are Good and Consume Me is . . . TRANSCENDENT. (10/10)
+ painfully relatable teenage slice-of-life storytelling, minigames that aren't supposed to be this fun, charmingly silly art style that never stops being fun to look at
- potentially triggering content makes this a game some may skip, will make you think about your younger, cringier days, crying is inevitable
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