Consume Me Can Be a Bit Too Autobiographical

During Chapter Five, for the first time, I struggled against the game’s difficulty—I had to use both of my allotted Cheat Days in the first two days in order to study enough to pass the Chemistry Exam. I had no idea how I was going to get through the rest of the week; the responsibilities were simply too much, and I hoped Jenny would voice the same fears I had.

She had been exhibiting signs of stress throughout the game, often resulting in humorously-framed moments of her bursting into tears that left me relieved knowing we were both equally stressed out. These story beats reminded me a lot of my own experiences when I was her age, cracking often under the overwhelming pressure of being a teenage girl. However, at this pivotal moment, when everything piled up too high for me or Jenny to manage, her boyfriend dumped her.

The breakup was a convenient explanation for Jenny’s breakdown. Her weekly tasks—which had already been affirmed by the narrative as irrational, yet, in a clever depiction of harmful thought patterns, simultaneously necessary to progress the game—suddenly fell away. She went back home to stay with her mom. I feared the breakup would lead to an even stricter dieting regime, with even more punishing gameplay and perhaps the dramatic but necessary self-reflection I was hoping for, but this wasn’t the case.

The game concludes with an epilogue, a decade after the events of the story and meta-textual noodling. Jenny, who throughout the course of the story expressed only hatred toward video games, becomes a game developer. From there, the game continues without the Bite meter looming over your head. The art style gets more primitive, perhaps indicative of an earlier iteration of the game—Jenny mentions redoing the art multiple times throughout development. The tasks, which are no longer yours to complete, center around the development of Consume Me and other games.

There is a scene where the developers of the game discuss how to end Consume Me, without really reaching a conclusion. When, in-game, Jenny’s co-developers ask her about how her real-life eating disorder ended, she says she just kind of stopped starving herself one day—before the momentous breakup, even. The language there, “starving myself,” haunts me. There wasn’t a single moment throughout the game where I understood what Jenny was doing to her body until that line.

Consume Me is not a game that benefits from an ambiguous ending. I walked away from my playthrough thinking, for the first time in my life, that maybe I should try going on a diet; it doesn’t seem as scary as I thought.

While art draws from the experience of being alive, life itself is not art. Life is random, and things happen without meaning. Art is directed, a series of decisions made with purpose. Consume Me isn’t obligated to condemn disordered eating, but for a game that mechanically centers itself on unhealthy dieting, its reluctance to interrogate its causes or, at the very least, its consequences is disorienting. Consume Me feels more like one of the diary entries it draws from than a story intended for a player.

Despite its incredible presentation and interesting ideas about narrator reliability varying through story and gameplay, Consume Me’s ending left me wondering what the entire experience was for.

Consume Me was developed by Jenny Jiao Hsia, AP Thomson, Jie En Lee, Violet W-P, and Ken “coda” Snyder, and was published by Hexecutable. It is available on Steam.

Bee Wertheimer is a games writer based in New York City. You can find them on Bluesky or visit their site beewertheimer.com.