Consume Me review: a raw and messy memoir in video game form

There’s a lot of math in diet culture. It’s all numbers — calories in, calories burned — and a constant tally running in one’s head. In some ways, disordered eating can be considered a disturbed sort of strategy game, which is precisely why Jenny Jiao Hsia and AP Thomson’s Consume Me works so well. The autobiographical game detailing Hsia’s teenage years is a darkly funny, honest peek into the desire to shape one’s life and body through food.

Food in Consume Me — tomatoes, kale, and pasta rendered as Tetris blocks — are assigned “bites,” a stand-in for calories. Jenny’s (the character, not the developer, who we’ll refer to using her last name, Hsia) lunch ritual is organizing these blocks on a plate, carefully selecting the pieces, and arranging them to both keep her full but stay under her self-imposed bite limit. It’s the sort of math that’s familiar in video games, but flipped upside down by the influence of controlled, disordered eating. This is no glossy-egged, open-faced croque madame from Final Fantasy XV, a dish that is as beautiful as it is powerful.

In most video games, food means strength: Final Fantasy XV’s croque madame awards a bonus that increases attack damage. A cabbage in Skyrim restores a single health point. When Link eats a mushroom skewer in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, his hearts are restored. Consume Me uses the familiar language of video game stats to cleverly flip the expectations. Reduced back down simply to numbers, food is no longer a source of power. It’s something to control, to fear. Hsia introduces Jenny’s diet — her teenage diet, because this is a memoir, after all — as the first of many all-consuming goals that will, supposedly, add up to the perfect life.

It begins simply, with Jenny’s mother criticizing her weight. The solution there, of course, is to diet, which is represented in Consume Me as a Tetris-esque minigame. The diet, which eventually is made clear as disordered eating, acts as an anchor throughout several years of Jenny’s life, spanning dating, friendships, and getting into college. Consume Me works so brilliantly because dieting and the other minigames aren’t just simple interactive elements, but are designed in service of the story. Dieting forces the player into the mindset of eating disorder math. And it’s not only the calculations of bites, but how those bites influence the rest of Jenny’s life — if Jenny has too many bites at lunch, she’ll need to exercise during her free time, which means she’ll have to choose between neglecting her schoolwork or her boyfriend. (Eat too little, though, and Jenny will end up bingeing on hot chips before bed, often undoing any bite deficit.)

It’s the impossible reality of being a teenage girl. Expectations are a Tetris board in which the bricks never stop coming. When you’ve cleared a row — being pretty and smart — another shape is inevitably right behind. Consume Me takes place over the days that make up weeks of Jenny’s life, in which the player must min-max her decisions by playing through different minigames, each of which ups Jenny’s skills or knocks something off a checklist but takes away precious, limited time. And every decision, even simply staying up late, feels dire, because in this reality, it is.

Reading, for example, is a minigame in which the player has to keep Jenny’s eyes on the book as her head spins, dodging rogue thoughts of her pup, boyfriend, or body. Exercising is the practice of corralling Jenny’s flailing arms into the correct positions. They’re all chaotic in the same ways WarioWare microgames are, matching the air of anxiety that lingers around Jenny’s life. Failing any of Jenny’s main goals means having to start over, either redoing a day or an entire week. It’s not necessarily hard to complete Jenny’s goals, but it does require anxious strategy, which is the point. Consume Me nails the mindset of its teenage protagonist.

Years pass in Consume Me, and Jenny’s goals shift and change slightly; those goals are dictated to her through a dysmorphic version of herself she talks to in the mirror. But diet remains non-negotiable throughout the entirety of the playable parts of the game. And that makes sense: disordered eating is so rarely just about food and image. It can also be about the illusion of control of one’s life through one’s body. Even as Jenny’s priorities change, bites always remain. Until, suddenly, they don’t.

Consume Me ends with a jump forward 10 years, skipping over any sort of resolution to her eating disorder. But it’s clear that something’s happened in that decade — maybe partially related to the jarring religious awakening that hits toward the end of the game — because food is no longer a running tally in Jenny’s life. A sausage is no longer three blocks long, a visualization of its 200 or so bites. It’s just a sausage. She thinks about food, image, and diet still, but it’s no longer the undercurrent of her life.

There’s a risk in having Consume Me end without some distinct resolution, but it’s just another example of why the game works: it’s a confident memoir that doesn’t shy away from the messy bits.

_{Consume Me is available now on Steam.}