- Follow the story of a stressed teen
- Fun mini-games
- See if you can survive
Consume Me is a narrative-driven coming-of-age story that feels like someone has made a WarioWare mini-game-filled story of being in high school. You play as Jenny, a teenager who is going through a lot of changes throughout the summertime, where she has decided that she must manage a diet, exercise, be cool, and also live her day-to-day life.
Consume Me is split into chapters, with your character getting older as each of these chapters continues. You start going into your last year of high school, but move through years of college as you are trying to understand exactly how to spend your very limited time. Each of your days is marked on the calendar, with bigger events getting their own special designs. When the day starts, you get to see a schedule of your time. Stuff like school, eating, and mysterious events are out of your control - but there are often options at those various points.
Then, there is your free time. Free time allows you to take your limited energy and try to meet your goals for the month. There are some mainline goals, then optional extra goals (though you often need to succeed at a defined number of these extra goals per chapter). There's a big bit of management where you are trying to exercise, make your mother happy, keep your boyfriend, watch your diet, study for school, and still get to sleep.
You do have three main resources to manage alongside your limited amount of moves before the end of free time: happiness, hunger and energy. Sometimes, random events and outfits can edit these moves, so it's a lot to watch!
All of the different events and actions you can choose to do in Consume Me work like WarioWare mini-games. You can build your lunchbox like a Tetris puzzle, swing your dog around to walk them for both money and exercise, read books by tapping intensely as your eyes scan the pages... everything has a short timer and feels fun, engaging, and just like it should.
Consume Me does follow some casually hard moments - not liking how you look, finding religion, and going to dinner with your boyfriend's mom. It's a lot of stuff that the average person has to deal with, so it feels relatable, but at the same time, it's very much gameified in a fun way.
The management of your time, especially as the chapters go on, becomes extremely challenging. Soon, you're up all night drinking energy drinks and trying to get rid of mental blocks so that you can study for your Bio exam. If you do fail at a main task, you can restart the day or restart the chapter with a bonus that can help you possibly get further for the next go. It's relatively low-risk, and I found myself wanting to play the next day again and again.
Consume Me review - "WarioWare-inspired life simulator"
Consume Me is an interesting way of telling such a relatable story, and all of the aspects just feel like they are very well done. It's a look at disordered eating, and at the average problems a teenager would experience as they grow older.
Jupiter Hadley
Jupiter is a prolific indie game journalist with a focus on smaller indie gems. She covers thousands of game jams and indie games on her YouTube channel, letting every game have a moment in the spotlight. She runs indiegamejams.com, a calendar of all of the game jams going on in the world, and judges many jams and events. You can find her on Twitter as @Jupiter_Hadley