Steam Next Fest Mini-Preview: Consume Me is a game with guts

Content note: Discussions of dieting and fatphobia.

I still look back with utter bafflement at the comments people felt comfortable making about my appearances while growing up — like when I met a great-grandmother of mine for the first time in middle school and some of the first words she said to me were a critique of my body size. (We were functionally strangers! This behavior is so weird!)

But it’s an all too familiar tale, and it’s this premise that sets off the routines in Consume Me, a life-sim RPG coming out on September 25, 2025. A demo is out on Steam now, and progress will carry into the full game.

Just the Facts

Developer: Hexecutable (Jenny Jiao Hsia and AP Thomson), Jie En Lee, Violet W-P, Ken "coda" Snyder

Publisher: Hexecutable

Platform(s): PC

Genre: Puzzling time-management and adolescence sim

Release Date: Sept. 25, 2025

It started as co-developer Jenny Jiao Hsia’s undergraduate capstone project, a personal reflection on her own dieting experiences in high school. But it’s evolved over nearly a decade and is now developed by a small team: Hsia and AP Thomson (Hexecutable) along with Jie En Lee, Violet W-P, and Ken "coda" Snyder. In 2025, the game took home the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and the Nuovo Award at the Independent Games Festival, along with the Wings Award.

And my early impression with the game’s first chapter tells me that there’ll be plenty more acclaim to come for Consume Me and its development team.

Its demo spans the first chapter. Your main character, Jenny, is living laughing and loving her way through the summer break before her senior year of high school. Then her mom makes a comment about her weight, with a bonus helping of “you’re too lazy” and “why can’t you be more like?” With the seed of discomfort planted, Jenny embarks on a new set of goals for her summer centered around diet and exercise, with weekly weigh-ins and a whole new set of rules to operate by. The version of herself she sees in the mirror tells her she’ll just have to learn how to be disciplined. 

As the player, you have to help Jenny reach her objectives through a variety of minigames.

Each day starts with a meal, in which you arrange somewhat distinguishable food-like Tetris-style blocks within Jenny’s available stomach space, aiming to satisfy her hunger without taking too many bites — the game’s fictionalized equivalent of calories. Overconsuming requires you to spend your limited free time exercising to burn off the excess. You also have to be careful not to leave too many hunger blocks unfilled, as it can lead to the need for an unexpected late night snack, throwing off your efforts for the day at the last minute.

This minigame comes with a randomized stomach shape and randomized order of Tetris blocks. So this whole dieting thing isn’t fully within your control, go figure.

In two demo playthroughs, I’ve managed to get that coveted perfectly balanced diet all of one time.

But this game is about everything consuming Jenny’s time and energy, not only food and exercise. You’re effectively managing her daily schedule, from chores to studying to relaxing, all while managing her stats: mood, energy, and hunger are each affected by how you spend the day.

You squeeze in study time through an impressively chaotic minigame that has you shepherding Jenny’s wildly swinging gaze toward the pages of a book, with a whirlpool of distractions trying to interfere. You fold the laundry in a timing-based minigame. You do a goofy version of aerobics, maneuvering Jenny’s springy spaghetti-limbed body to try and match various poses. You walk the dog in this oddball oscillating pattern, trying to avoid obstacles and pick up dropped cash on the street (to be spent at the corner store and on a swimsuit for a beach party where Jenny's crush will be). 

There’s this awkward, frenetic energy in each of the minigames that both brings humor and lightheartedness to what could otherwise be a heavy topic for a game. It also helps create this futile feeling that evokes teenagerhood, where Jenny is starting to gain the expectations of being an adult without any real instruction. She’s a bit out of her depth in all this. She doesn’t totally know how to diet or exercise — she says as much at the start. But she feels the pressure to make it a cornerstone of her daily life.

All said, the gameplay manages to be way more fun than it should be.

As groan-inducing as it is, and as much as you want to save Jenny from this canon event, Consume Me is incredibly well-built to deliver its message. As the player, you’re living by Jenny’s tangled set of rules. And, even knowing that diets aren’t effective or sustainable, your goals for doing well in the game are tied to her goals. There’s a constant mental disconnect and you’re effectively sucked into the numbers game along with her. But, as the game states in its early content warning, Jenny starts out this new journey feeling rewarded… but the game has over 13 possible endings, ‘most of them bad,’ so I don’t expect Consume Me to promote a glamorous or positive view of Jenny’s restrictive behaviors.

This game isn’t just about food; it’s more broadly about Jenny’s growing responsibilities and constant need to optimize. She’s stepping onto a tightrope that’s so tense it could snap at any second, adding more and more pressures upon her precious little free time as she tries to chase constant personal improvement, whatever that looks like for her at the moment — that ever-moving goalpost for self-actualization that starts young, especially when the expectations of your family are high.

That’s why, far from high school though I may be, Jenny’s story hit close to home as someone juggling a full-time job by day and trying to keep a little indie games media site alive and relevant by night — plus, y’know, all the other stuff it takes to achieve the impossible standard of being ‘well’ and ‘fulfilled’ and ‘balanced’ in a grindset culture that always has you feeling that you could have been getting better results if you'd only tried harder and did more.

A core piece of Consume Me's gameplay is that you gain upgrades as you go along, increasing your skills by reading books, getting new outfits that can boost your stats and chore money earned, and getting perks that come with tradeoffs. For example: You can now exercise a little no matter what activity you’re doing, but the actual aerobics activity is a little harder, or you gain the ability to listen to audiobooks to study and exercise at the same time, but the multitasking negatively affects your mood and energy.

I faced a bonus goal to do four activities in one day, which is a tough ask that’s highly dependent on boosts resulting from doing an activity well or drinking coffee to get an extra free-time unit. And when I actually managed to do it — I can’t lie, it felt damn good. Did it matter? Who’s to say. But did it allow me to check off a little box, fulfilling an expectation that someone else set for me? Yes.

Reliving your teenage years might not sound like the escapist fun many people seek out from video games, but I regret to inform you that Consume Me is a blast to play. It maintains a whimsical and upbeat spirit even while the gameplay and narrative reinforce that you can win the daily battles, but there may not be a real victory here. Just a growing number of all-consuming responsibilities driven by increasing internal and external pressures as Jenny tries to build a sustainable future for herself, like the rest of us.

One thing worth noting: Consume Me takes steps to handle the subject matter with care. It has an upfront content note and things like using emojis instead of numbers on the scale and turning calories to "bites." But the subject matter is what it is, so if themes of calorie-counting and disordered eating are difficult for you, it might be one to pass by. This is echoed by the team itself through the game's opening slides.