Consume Me

There is a deep mismatch between gameplay and messaging on this, that comes crashing together in an absolute puff of nothing in terms of a climax. It is fun, and if you think you'll like it from the trailer I think that you will. You should buy this game and support this developer because I believe that they will only go on to make better things because the potential shown in this is huge. But the narrative on this is a total nothingburger because it's autobiographical and not even a particularly interesting autobiography. It's about the stressors of being a girl, of developing an eating disorder, of meticulously juggling the expectations of every aspect in your life, and then all of the fine-tuned, very fun gameplay that you spent the whole game experimenting with different combos on and fine-tuning with great joy, comes crashing apart and you're told-not-shown, how that was all solved by Christianity, but then not really because Christianity stopped being super important in the longterm, and then life kinda just moves on. The game makes it very fun and cute to try and efficiently max out your eating disorder diet, study for your SATs, try and get teacher recommendations, and save up enough money to visit your long-distance Cornell boyfriend. But the narrative of the game by its very nature is forced to contradict the feelings its gameplay is giving you. Eating like this isn't healthy, living like this isn't healthy, it says-after creating a million different cute animations and happy sound effects for whenever you achieve a goal, resetting the game if you fail certain ones so that you can do them over and over again until you get it just right. And so how could it end? I kept expecting each chapter to show how much worse this new diet and lifestyle was, for stress to really start to show, for cutesy music to turn dark and dreary. But no, life just, kinda goes on, and the game ends without any real fanfare. A disappointing ending to a really otherwise very strong game. I'm eager to see what the development team comes out with next.

Muy bueno, no habla tanto del tca en realidad, es más una historia coming of age inspirada en hechos reales con administracion del tiempo tipo Persona y minijuegos.

I heard about this game through the NoClip podcast and was primarily intrigued because it was basically the format of a game I myself created a prototype for back in 2018. Inspired by UnderTale, I wanted to create something of a real life simulator, based around minigames that would get easier or harder based on the character's mental state - touching on themes of fantasy, the wonders of indulging in it and the dangers of retreating too far into it. On a mechanical level, Consume Me is far more crystalised realisation of my prototype. Not only are the minigames fun in and of themselves (and can be quite challenging), the balancing of how demands are placed on you incrementally is superb. Despite this being an autographical piece about being a teenager under a lot of pressure, I routinely linked the sensation of trying to balance TOO MANY PRIORITIES to my adult life and its competing obligations, which meant I identified strongly to Jenny's experience. Ludonarrative etc. etc. The mechanic of "bites" being linked to how many calories Jenny can eat is an ever present worry, and I think Consume Me manages to effectively communicate the disordered nature of viewing food numerically. When constructing lunches in the "lunch building" minigame, leaving spaces may keep yo under your "bites" limit for the day, but you lose a huge amount of 'Guts' which really hamstrings your ability to perform tasks later on in the day. Snacking late at night because you don't have enough energy to study is EXACTLY the kind of thing that mechanically puts you in the shoes of the protagonist. People with a history of disordered eating should tread with caution engaging with the game, but I paradoxically think they are the people who would get the most out of it. As someone who has had a disordered relationship with food, I felt very 'seen' playing this game, and I reflected after playing how easy it was for me to just take it as a given to have days where my "bite" count was well below the daily limit and I left Jenny starving. The fact I did that so easily gave me pause - only a good piece of art could make me question my own behaviour like that. The visuals are charming, the animation is expressive and snippy, the writing serves the story being told (and combined with the visuals is occasionally very funny), and the mechanics are well balanced. I think this is a very good game. But because it's so good, I see some missed potential. If you want to avoid spoilers the TLDR is this: in general, I think this is definitely more of an enthusiast game, but I can very much see a casual player enjoying their time and being made to think. It's well worth the price of admission, so give it a go. *********SPOILERS******* IMO, it doesn't go far enough. When I heard the description of the game, I assumed the game would eventually build to a point where the POV character would be putting so much pressure on themselves and be setting so many impossible goals for themselves, that it would eventually be impossible to complete, and the player character would then have to suffer the consequences of not being able to fulfil all the tasks. The game had been building to this moment nicely: adding more goals week by week, chapter by chapter, that really made you have to think about how you solved the problem of keeping all these plates spinning. But in the last chapter, you maybe have 5 minutes of gameplay where that's the case. 5 minutes of gameplay where you, as the player, FEEL like everything is overwhelming and impossible. You see that the character in her lowest emotional moment, but it's more shown to you in small interactive vignettes rather than as part of regular gameplay. There was so much room here to have the player suffer real gameplay consequences to being overwhelmed, and have the characters' life circumstances affect core gameplay in a profound way. They did this briefly, but in my mind not anywhere near far enough. I felt like I wanted to hit rock bottom with Jenny, not watch Jenny hit rock bottom and then timeskip to the end. I wanted to feel overwhelmed with her, hit her darkest moment when she can't do ANYTHING and then see her gradually, bit by bit, day by day, grow out of it. In the epilogue, Jenny (the developer whose life the game is based on) talks about how she just kind of stopped tracking calories after a while and moved to a more "normal" way of eating. Show us that through gameplay!!! That would have been so valuable for people to see!! Maybe the goals could have been stripped away day by day, or made more generous. We, as the player, could get rewarded for doing more enjoyable things and fewer stressful or demanding things until Jenny recovered. We could have had our energy and mood nerfed while this happened. There was so much room to tell the story through the gameplay, and I felt it didn’t go anywhere near as far as it could. All of the above might sound negative, but it’s not. I don’t write reviews on Steam - I’m writing this because it deserves my time and attention and is a compelling work of art. This is a very good game, made with real skill and I want to see where this team goes next, because Consume Me has so much room to grow.

Haven't finished but super fun so far. Beautiful art style

Cute game BUT WHAT KIND ENDING IS THAT

Anxiety inducing fun!

An incredible game, the type of story that could only be told in this medium. Exceptionally smart design. Don't hesitate to buy.

好设计

Esse jogo é uma bibliografia, é uma experiência bem única, nunca joguei algo parecido.

A lovely yet relatably heart-breaking minigame resource management life sim. It's inspiring to see the journey of someone's life (even if it's dramatizeda bit)