Consume Me is a raw and funny 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."

Diet culture is depicted as numerical, with calories and a constant mental tally that turns disordered eating into a strategic, controlling practice. Consume Me uses autobiographical portrayal of teenage years to translate food into Tetris-like blocks labeled as 'bites' that stand in for calories. The protagonist's lunch ritual involves arranging selected pieces on a plate to stay full while remaining under a self-imposed bite limit. The game's mechanics mirror familiar videogame math but invert conventional food-as-strength tropes, replacing restorative power-ups with constraints that expose ritualized, controlled eating behavior.

Read at The Verge