If you accept the received wisdom that the Game awards are the Oscars of the interactive industry, 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.
A pizza date leads to watching her eating for the rest of the week … Consume Me. Photograph: Hexecutable
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 attaché 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. Junk foods come in appealingly convenient shapes – but filling up with a cookie means spending your precious free time trying to burn it off, or using up one of your limited cheat days. Leave any gaps and her stomach will rumble, meaning she’s likely to need a snack later.
You’ll also need to keep Jenny’s energy and mood above zero or it’s game over. That’s straightforward at first: the tasks that make up your schedule, from chores to studying to applying makeup, comprise simple but fun minigames with the antic energy of Nintendo’s WarioWare series but little of the challenge. Items earned or bought with pocket money make it easier still to keep Jenny happy and healthy. But time is the enemy, and balancing needs and wants becomes steadily trickier. Rely on energy drinks too often, for instance, and a caffeine headache awaits, meaning any activity but bed rest will make you grumpy.
A sinkside squabble with an overbearing mother … Consume Me. Photograph: Hexecutable
Whether things are going well or not, it’s beautifully observed. Ominous music accompanies the weekly weigh-in, as you physically drag Jenny’s feet on to the scales. Cleaning the bathroom is followed by a forensic inspection from your overbearing mother, who leans in close to scrutinise your handiwork, pressing her index finger against the sink to ensure it comes away spotless. When Jenny first meets boyfriend Oliver’s well-to-do parents, the simple introduction of an anxiety meter is enough to have your own heart beating a little faster, even before her imagination casts his prying mother as a trenchcoated detective, a spotlight adding to the interrogative vibe. And in the couple’s first attempt at making out, their clumsy limbs crisscross the screen, forcing you to manoeuvre round them to lock lips.
Love soon becomes another obligation, and thus a source of tension, shrewdly re-contextualised in each chapter. Jenny can’t miss too many of the potential dates she pencils in her diary, but a trip to a pizza restaurant forces her to be strict with her eating for the rest of the week. When Oliver goes to college, Jenny must invest valuable evening time texting or video-calling him, convinced their long-distance relationship will take “poison damage” every day if she doesn’t. (By night, she presses her face against a glass case, tearfully watching petals fall from the rose inside it, brilliantly evoking the way everything becomes a melodrama at that age.)
This might be a game about routines, but despite some purposeful repetition, Consume Me never fully settles into one of its own; it keeps finding inventive uses (and reuses) of systems to punch home its themes without losing its sense of humour. If you have an uneasy relationship with food and personal fitness, there are moments that will hit close to home – and even if you eat and exercise well, you can surely relate to being too busy with life’s essentials to find room for the things you’d rather be doing.
Again, though, I’m wary of making it sound too much like eating your vegetables. This spiky, funny, and bracingly original game consumed a few laughter- and tear-filled evenings, and left memories that will stay with me a good deal longer.
Consume Me is available now, £12.79
