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Siliconera Saturday, September 27, 2025 9:00 AM
Jenny Jiao Hsia has a point to make in Consume Me, a new life sim game, and boy is its gameplay going to make sure you understand it. It captures the anxiety-ridden moments of young adulthood perfectly, and quickly illustrates with its story, goals, and minigames how unhealthy and impossible attempting to be "perfect" can be. This is accomplished by making you go through periods of her life in Princess Maker and Umamusume stat-buildingfashion, planning out her schedule and hopefully meeting goals so she can push forward.
Jenny is enjoying her last summer vacation before her senior year, but it isn't going as expected. After her critical mother compares her to a rival and suggests she's overweight, it goes all to her head. She's convinced to start crash dieting, limiting how much she eats and exercising more while handling her summer homework. However, as time goes on and she needs to juggle more things like romance and school, we see firsthand how daunting and debilitating that kind of approach can be.
Consume Me sort of takes the same approach as Princess Maker and Umamusume, only this game doesn't focus on stats and prioritizes meeting certain objectives within a period of time. At the start of each chapter, we get conditions Jenny needs to meet. Early on, this involves staying on a diet without going overboard on "cheat" days while managing chores. Tasks are presented as WarioWare style microgames such as quickly doing makeup, keeping her eyes focused on a book while avoiding distractions, ragdolling her limbs into positions for yoga, folding clothes, wiping down a dirty bathroom, walking a dog, and carefully arranging low-calorie (bites) food on a plate to cover designated hunger spots and stay under a set intake. As long as you tick off objectives by doing tasks X number of times, staying within a certain range, or finishing certain tasks, you're fine!
It's all on-point commentary, of course. While the tasks themselves aren't terribly difficult, as chapters go on the lack of time and other circumstances make meeting objectives feel near impossible. For example, in the third chapter a segment involves besting the rival classmate in tasks. But this is accomplished via minigames influenced largely via RNG, making success luck of the draw. Likewise, school meals are always going to be designed to be "filling," putting Jenny over the greatly reduced count, which means trying to waste valuable time exercising to still come in under bite counts or spending money on stowed away food that will be lower in bites.
It also means that while I believe Consume Me hammers home an important message and starts out fun, after a point the game may stop being entertaining as it does drive the point home. There are failsafes, where if you would have failed, you can roll-back to the start of a chapter with a level-up to help you get a bit of an edge the second time around. But then that means redoing that whole depressing and demoralizing area again. Which yes, I get is the point. We're supposed to realize and understand how devastating this is to a human being and that it's unhealthy. I pushed onward because I had to. My fear is that others might not due to frustration and fatigue with tasks and systems that feel like they work against you. Which, of course they should, as it is mirroring the damage being done in real life.
Someone abandoning the game would be a shame, however, as Consume Me is quite clever. The writing is quite fun and even funny, and it feels like it perfectly captures the sort of negative feedback we get from ourselves and others. I love some of the references to other things, such as a callback to Disney's Beauty and the Beast with a withering rose. The character and UI designs also call back to aesthetics and artistic directions that feel in line with teenage designs and early 2010s color schemes.
Consume Me is fantastic at making the player feel things. Frustration at Jenny's situation. Joy at actually managing to accomplish goals or get through a lunch session while staying under the "bites" count and leaving no "hunger" sections behind. Relief when you manage to check both standard and optional objectives off her list for the month. Anger when you can tell Jenny doesn't need to put herself through this, is fine how she is, and shouldn't torture herself for the sake of other people's (incorrect) opinions. It's an important game and I'm glad it exists, even if trying to succeed in it sometimes frustrated me more than Bennett Foddy's Baby Steps.
Consume Me is available for PCs.
The post Review: Consume Me Gameplay Hammers Home Its Message appeared first on Siliconera. |
