I tend to try to avoid playing video games that cast you as a teenager; I don’t have much nostalgia for those years, or much desire to revisit their darker parts. But I was nevertheless intrigued by a recent demo for the IGF award-winning Consume Me, a schedule-based game that sees you managing a teenager’s packed days while dealing with pressures of food and body image.
(Content note for themes of disordered eating.)
Consume Me follows a high school girl named Jenny through her days. The game started in the summer, but Jenny still had plenty to do. Each day is broken into sections that you can fill with tasks from your to-do list, such as chores, studying, exercise, and even just vegging out. Chores like cleaning the bathroom or walking the dog gave me some of the money I needed to buy a swimsuit for a party at the end of the week to impress a boy; meanwhile, I felt pressured to become “interesting” so the boy would like me, via optional tasks like learning to do my makeup. Getting makeup to learn with, of course, required some of that money I was saving for the swimsuit, which required doing more chores, which meant missing out on all of the other tasks I needed or wanted to do.
These tasks are all done via WarioWare-style minigames. They’re hectic and imprecise in ways that feel like they really capture the chaos of being an over-burdened young person in an awkward teenage body. Studying, for example, is done by clicking your mouse to keep your gaze aligned on a rotating book while avoiding distractions. Folding laundry requires you to click when some lines meet to precisely fold your clothes. Exercising requires you to fling your character’s head and arms to match poses. As you play, you can earn items or level up stats that make these games easier, but I never felt like I’d mastered them.
A big part of these games involves dieting and food. Early on, Jenny’s mother criticizes her weight, inspiring her to start dieting. “Maybe I really should go on a diet,” Jenny says. “But I’ve never done that before. I don’t know how?!” That “how” is by taking in under a certain amount of calories every day (here called “bites”); at first you do this by balancing food items on a plate, but later you have to arrange Tetris-looking blocks on a grid, filling up as many hunger-representing blocks as you can while still staying under your bite goal. If you don’t fill enough blocks, you have to have a snack in the middle of the night, costing money if you have to buy one at the store and potentially putting you over your bite limit.
It was easy, as Consume Me surely intends, to fall into unhealthy habits: exercising off my excess bites, buying gum at the store to satisfy my hunger meter without actually consuming bites, feeding my highest-bite food to the dog instead of trying to fit it into my grid. Eating, like the rest of Jenny’s life, is a balancing act, and I was never able to make everything work in harmony: money had to be sacrificed to mood, mood had to be sacrificed to my diet goals, my diet goals had to be sacrificed to eating enough food to function. Jenny’s calendar features a weigh-in date, and these moments are stressful and intense. There’s a lengthy warning at the beginning of the demo for all of these topics, and though the game obscures calorie-counting through bites and the scale relies on emojis rather than numbers, it might be a hard game to play if those kinds of topics are particularly tough for you.
I started this paragraph by writing “I’ve never really struggled with my weight,” but that’s not quite true. When I was a kid, my mom was very focused on her looks and had high standards for femininity, which my twin sister and I could never live up to; my sister was captain of (and the only girl on) our high school wrestling team, and I’m a trans guy, though I didn’t have the words for that at the time. Between how seldom my mom actually ate the dinners she cooked and my sister regularly doing extreme weight-loss things for wrestling, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized I had little idea what “normal” eating looks like, or a realistic understanding of what it means to be a healthy weight. While my mom was never as straightforwardly critical about weight as Jenny’s mom (unlike her frequent criticisms of my femininity; one of the only good things about going bald has been not having to go to the hairdresser anymore, the scene of screaming matches between my mom and I that made me panic well into adulthood), her ideas about weight and food definitely got in my head. My sister went on to join the Army, which comes with its own body image pressures, especially for women; when I visit her, we’ll often both notice the way she inadvertently talks to her own kids about weight and exercise and try to do things differently.
Revisiting stuff like this is why I don’t like playing games about being a teenager, but I appreciated the way Consume Me balances this core theme with other issues and topics, and the way the whimsical design of the minigames keeps things from getting too dark. Consume Me’s Steam description says the game features “over 13 possible endings: Most of them bad,” which sounds about right for growing up. It’s a game that maintains a skillful balance between being really fun and kind of super upsetting, and I’m curious to see if it can keep that balance when the full game comes out later this year.
