09/10/2025
Consume Me – CONGRATULATIONS
I am not and will never be, no matter how hard I try to be, a teenage girl. Time just doesn't work like that. Though, I have been blessed with an open mind that rebukes my best attempts to close it. So, I get it man.
Consume Me is split into brief, day-by-day minigames, a collage of tiny mechanical procedures. Each round is over in seconds, but the repetition turns it into a kind of comfortable ritual. You quickly forget in your gamer’s joy of doing well that you are playing as the manifestation of a teenage girl’s misery. Each day you choose your outfits and orders of tasks swerving around obstacles. Everything has buffs and debuffs and completion bars and progression and timers and all kinds of anxiety produced representations of just trying to live life and maybe do well at it.
Video Games are often a burlap sack of squirming worms. The games-player is starving on an island in the middle of the ocean and a man in a blazer and trainers with a horrible haircut arrives to grant you this sack with an opening that never has quite a large enough aperture for you to stuff your hands inside and feast yourself on gross worms that neither fill nor nourish.
There is a generation of anorexic gamers just crying, even if they don't know it, for something to mean anything in the modern industry. Consume Me does mean something, though it's personal so I think can only be reviewed personally.
Consume Me has arrived across my desk at a strangely opportune time for it to matter to me. Five months ago I’d unemployed myself and within a month of unemployment saw myself enlarge by 5kg. Who knows what I was eating. Having always struggled with weight and previously having had some success with weight loss but ultimately failing last year, I began anew and had lost 13kg surprisingly quickly. In this same time of unemployment and a deep introspection I’d decided that I wanted to enter the lucrative field of “Gonzo Writing About Video Games”. When you’re unemployed you can play so many games man and it's like no big deal.
In a summer of uncharacteristic productivity I’d written some stuff I was pretty proud of. I’d begun a project with friends where we play a game every month and review them together and writing long scripts for youtube videos. Have you guys seen how long it takes to edit a youtube video? Balancing this diet with this engaging yet currently fruitless endeavour was simple at first, eventually my unemployment money ran out. Nobody wanted to hire me outside of working in pubs. Having watched Mad Men over this period of unemployment and watching Don Draper, my best friend, ask for his job back, I messaged my old boss if they’d please take me back.
Upon returning to my old job I was immediately drafted into helping open their new venue, doing things I’d never done before. Quickly my lonely unemployed but somewhat diligent lifestyle became 10 hour days of lifting things, painting walls, drilling screws and fixing toilet seats. I’d returned to a world where people had missed me after recusing myself until I’d found a job. So I wasn’t just working all the time I also found myself trapped in the fun of socialising. Doing this for 10 days in a row I found E4M2 Perfect Exhaustion. I didn’t have the time or energy to play video games anymore let alone write about them. How am I going to build a portfolio for Edge Magazine or get someone to patronize me on patreon if I’m too busy working to make anything. Also as if they could smell the unemployment on me suddenly people wanted to talk to me on dating apps in a romantic manner. How am I supposed to balance all that?
That's the central question Consume Me attempts to tackle which it manages with whimsy and lack of judgement. Jenny Jiao Hsia (the subject of biography) loves past self and depicts herself with an honesty that would make many video game publishers retch. The game remains impressively fun over its entire course. It has a sense of humour that never feels like it's making fun of what's happening. It's laughing with her past self rather than at her. Each task is an abstraction of dieting, exercising, studying and having a life. Each minigame abstraction virtuosically depicts the stress of the misery in these things while also being fun playthings. I mean it as a compliment when I say the game screams Video Game School. I’m so happy to see the medium taken seriously as an art form rather than the project of a programmer or the invention of an obfuscated slot machine.
I found myself going through the game just trying to keep up, getting all my tasks done as much as possible. I didn’t consider that the game could be something you’re good at. When I told my sister to play it she found herself somewhat disappointed at the conclusion of what you could call failure. When it all breaks down at the end and you find the hollowness to self-defined self-improvement. Playing the game I felt myself always just keeping my head above the water, the task of finishing 16 tasks in a day seemingly impossible. I found my sister reportedly was impossibly performing 20 tasks in a day with aplomb. So I can understand that the ending might feel like all your work was for nothing. Though it's not entirely obvious at first how biographical the game will be, eventually the life of the creator defines the story beyond your ability to walk the dog or play food tetris everyday.
In answer to the criticism I’ve seen of this game being Christian propaganda I have this to say:
I’m not a christian, I have sympathy but I don’t think I’d find myself in a church apart from weddings and funerals. The ending of Evangelion had as much impact of revelation on me as anything I've perused in the bible. It's clear to me that Jenny was not trying to proselytize, just honestly showing what helped her in a tricky time. One day, halfway between my parent’s divorce and starting secondary school, I looked at myself in a mirror. I hated myself more than I felt anything about anything else. I carried this with me for years after. One day, years later I was pushing a trolley at my job in Tesco early in the morning, doing some unknown person’s shopping and I almost began to weep at the idea that Jesus might’ve died for my sins. Wherever that feeling came from remains unknown to me, though I learnt from myself and the quiet empty supermarket that to try to love yourself is the same thing as loving yourself. If you need a character to get that ball rolling then by all means allow it because trying to love yourself is the most important thing you’ll ever do.