Consume Me

Games about eating disorders exist. Games that make you feel the arithmetic of one — the calorie ledgers, the bargaining, the grim satisfaction of a “good” day — are vanishingly rare. Consume Me, from designers Jenny Jiao Hsia and AP Thomson (with collaborators Jie En Lee, Violet W-P, and composer Ken “coda” Snyder), is that second kind of game, and it was a long time in development.

The premise is semi-autobiographical: you play Jenny, a high school senior who is young, in love, and locked in a private war with her own body. The structure is a life-simulation RPG in the lineage of Princess Maker and Persona‘s calendar systems — each day hands you limited hours to split between schoolwork, college applications, a boyfriend, part-time obligations, and the relentless project of self-improvement. But where those games treat stat-grinding as aspirational, Consume Me turns it inward and makes it sting.

The market positioning is unapologetically indie. This is a personal-essay game with production values, a paid release at $9.99 that arrived on Steam and iOS on June 1, 2026. The pedigree is real: it took home the Independent Games Festival’s Seumas McNally Grand Prize and Nuovo Award — a rare double. It also carries a 4.6/5 rating on the App Store. Hsia’s earlier vignette work (Stellar Smooch, Wobble Yoga) always flirted with body and gesture; Consume Me is where that sensibility grows teeth.

• The Meal-Puzzle System: Meals are assembled by fitting food pieces onto a plate like a grid puzzle while a calorie counter ticks upward. It’s the game’s thesis in mechanical form — dieting rendered as a spatial optimization problem, satisfying and sickening in the same motion.
• Calendar-Driven Life Sim: Every in-game day forces triage across school, romance, family, work, and self-care with too few hours for all of it. The scheduling pressure is the emotional engine; something always gets sacrificed.
• Branching Story with 13+ Endings: Choices compound across a full senior year toward more than a dozen endings — most of them bad on purpose. The game refuses the tidy recovery arc, and it’s more honest for it.
• Minigame Vignettes: Exercise, makeup application, and clothes that wear out and demand laundering all get their own micro-mechanics, extending the game’s argument that maintaining a body is unpaid, repetitive labor.

The Loop That Indicts You

Most message-driven games deliver their politics through dialogue. Consume Me delivers its critique through systems, which is why it works. The core loop runs like this: wake up, allocate your hours, assemble meals under a calorie ceiling, squeeze in exercise minigames, manage Jenny’s mood and relationships, sleep, repeat. Individually, each activity is a snackable arcade toy — bright, bouncy, over in seconds. Collectively, they form a treadmill designed to feel compulsive at first and oppressive later.

The meal puzzle deserves specific praise because it’s doing something genuinely difficult. Fitting tetromino-shaped food onto a plate is fun. The pieces snap pleasingly; clearing a tight configuration under budget produces a little dopamine hit. Then you notice what the game has done: it has made you complicit. You’re not watching Jenny obsess over calories — you’re the one hunting for the configuration that leaves her hungriest while still “winning.” The obsessive logic of diet culture stops being a theme you observe and becomes a strategy you execute. That’s mechanical rhetoric of a caliber most games never attempt.

Scarcity as Storytelling

The scheduling layer is where the RPG bones show. Hours are the scarce resource, and the game is ruthless about opportunity cost. Study for the SATs and you skip the gym; see your boyfriend and the college essay slips. Family pressure, religion, and fatphobia enter through scripted scenes that land because the systems have already softened you up. When Jenny’s mother comments on her weight, the dialogue just names what the mechanics have been making you calculate all along.

The writing threads a needle that shouldn’t be threadable: it’s darkly funny without being flippant. Jenny’s internal monologue has the specific, self-lacerating wit of someone who knows her behavior is irrational and can’t stop. The humor isn’t a spoonful of sugar; it’s the coping mechanism, presented as such.

Where It Strains

The critique cuts both ways. Some minigames — makeup, laundry — are thinner than the meal puzzle and repeat past the point of usefulness. Mid-game pacing sags as the calendar structure asserts itself; there’s a stretch built on executing routine rather than discovering anything new, and while that repetition is arguably thematic (disorder is repetition), argument-by-tedium is still tedium. And the endings structure — 13+, most bad — means many players will finish a first run feeling punished by outcomes the game barely signaled. That’s defensible artistically. It will still frustrate completionists who expect legible cause and effect.

A content note belongs in any honest review: the game depicts disordered eating with enough fidelity that players with lived experience report it as both cathartic and potentially triggering. The candor is the achievement. It’s also the caveat.

The art direction is doing more than it appears. The style is flat, poppy, and toy-like — pastel bodies, rubbery limbs, UI elements that squash and stretch like a Nintendo minigame collection. That cheerfulness is a deliberate misdirection: the game looks like WarioWare and reads like a memoir about self-harm, and the dissonance between surface and subject generates most of its unease. Jenny’s body, which the game renders as manipulable segments during exercise and measurement scenes, is treated as an object precisely because that’s how she treats it.

Technically, there’s little to worry about on paper. A 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and the UI is designed to scale sensibly across screen sizes. The soundtrack — bouncy, slightly wrong, like elevator music in a hospital — is a quiet standout.

The Steam version (Windows/Mac) is the natural fit for long sessions. Mouse control suits the plate puzzles’ precision, and the calendar structure rewards sitting down for a full in-game month at a stretch.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Consume Me seems built for iPhone. The minigames are clearly touch-first — dragging food pieces onto a plate with a finger is more tactile, more intimate, more implicating than doing it by mouse. And there’s a thematic resonance the developers surely understand: real diet-tracking happens on phones. Playing Jenny’s calorie obsession on the same device that hosts MyFitnessPal collapses the distance between game and subject in a way a monitor never will. The iOS build is a proper universal app (iPhone, iPad, Mac), not a lazy port. Session length is the only trade-off — the day-by-day structure chunks naturally for mobile, but longer narrative scenes read better on a bigger screen.

Consume Me does one of the hardest things in games: it makes its argument through play. The dieting puzzle isn’t a gimmick bolted onto a memoir; it is the memoir, translated into verbs. The pacing wobbles, a few minigames are filler, and the ending structure will divide players — real reservations, but not enough to outweigh what the game accomplishes. We recommend it without hesitation to anyone ready for it. Hsia, Thomson, and their collaborators have made one of the more distinctive independent games in recent memory: bitter, hilarious, formally inventive, and honest in a way the medium rarely permits. It’s best played on a phone — the device where the design lands hardest, and where feeling weird about it is the point.