Consume Me review - anything but empty calories

"then you could say the Independent Games Festival is its Cannes, and the Seumas McNally Grand prize its Palme d'Or. So you'd assume the release of this year's winner would be widely and loudly trumpeted. Not so. Consume Me's apparently underwhelming early sales and surprising lack of reviews speak more to ongoing issues of discoverability (and busy critics struggling with an autumn glut) than the game itself, which is an absolute delight."

"Admittedly, it's easy to make it sound like something you should play rather than something you'd really want to. Developed over a decade by Jenny Jiao Hsia (with collaborators AP Thomson, Jie En Lee, Violet W-P, and Ken Snyder), it's a quasi-autobiographical story about an Asian American high-schooler attempting to lose weight while navigating the stresses and pitfalls of teenage life. It involves efficient management of energy and time. A content notice warns about themes of bullying, fatphobia and disordered eating. It's also somehow one of 2025's funniest games."

"Consume Me deftly negotiates this tonal minefield, playfully but incisively satirising the gamification of diet culture. Protagonist Jenny's mealtimes are abstracted into puzzle form. In a process that reminded me of arranging Leon's attache case in Resident Evil 4, you slot foodstuffs shaped like Tetris blocks into a grid representing Jenny's stomach. L-shaped kale and S-shaped tomatoes will keep you under your daily target (crucially, she's not counting calories but bites) while eggs handily plug those awkward single spaces."

Consume Me is a quasi-autobiographical indie game developed over a decade by Jenny Jiao Hsia with collaborators, centering on an Asian American high-schooler managing weight and teenage pressures. Meals are abstracted into Tetris-like puzzle mechanics where players slot shaped food pieces into a stomach grid, counting bites rather than calories, and balancing junk food with limited cheat days and time spent burning calories. The game satirises diet culture while addressing bullying, fatphobia and disordered eating, and combines incisive social commentary with unexpected humour. Early sales and scarce reviews point to broader discoverability challenges within the indie games ecosystem.

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