IGF-nominated indie title dives into the complicated, often painful relationship between food, control, and growing up.
Consume Me, a finalist at the 2025 Independent Games Festival (IGF), is not your average minigame collection. Blending intimate storytelling with experimental design, the game explores the mental weight of dieting, self-image, and obsession—through quirky visuals, food puzzles, and an undercurrent of dark humor.
Created by co-directors Jenny Jiao Hsia and AP Thomson, the game tackles personal experiences through a deeply stylized lens. It’s a raw, layered, and oddly funny portrayal of how dieting culture shapes everyday life, from meals to relationships to mental health.
A personal journey turned experimental game
For Jenny Jiao Hsia, Consume Me began as a college project. The idea grew from her teenage struggles with dieting and evolved into a game that’s as honest as it is strange. Working alongside Thomson and a small team of collaborators, she translated those experiences into gameplay that mimics the obsessive, data-driven mindset of calorie counting.
“I lived through this,” says Hsia. “And I wanted to turn that experience into something interactive, something people could understand—not just through story, but through play.”
Thomson, who handled most of the programming and system design, says the team approached the subject matter with a mix of respect and irreverence. Their goal wasn’t to preach, but to evoke an emotional and mechanical understanding of what it’s like to live in a world that reduces food to numbers and identity to metrics.
Turning food anxiety into mechanics
One of the game’s central mechanics is a recurring food Tetris minigame. Players must “fit” meals into a restricted system of calorie targets and hunger management—mirroring the rigid, contradictory pressures of dieting. But the game also includes hidden systems and randomized events that challenge players’ sense of control.
“We wanted to reflect how dieting often feels confusing and unfair,” explains Thomson. “You do everything right, and it still doesn’t work out.”
The player’s decisions influence hidden “event decks” behind the scenes. Go to bed hungry, and you might randomly trigger a “snack attack” the next day. It’s a clever system that mimics the mental toll of restriction, while still letting players experiment with the outcome.
It’s not all about food
While food is the core theme, Consume Me explores how diet culture bleeds into other parts of life—school, friendships, family, and self-worth. The game simulates Jenny’s daily routine, gradually layering in more tasks, pressures, and conflicting expectations.
As the game progresses, it becomes less about calories and more about overwhelm, reflecting how people often shift from one obsession to the next in search of control.
“We wanted to show how these behaviors spill over,” says Thomson. “Dieting doesn’t happen in isolation—it becomes the lens through which everything else is experienced.”
Art that evolves with the game
The game’s playful, colorful art style is another standout. Originally based on Hsia’s early prototypes, the visuals evolved over years of development, blending new artwork with older assets for a raw, collage-like aesthetic. Backgrounds by Jie En Lee (Kelly) and music by Ken “coda” Snyder round out the hand-crafted feel.
“It looks like 20 artists worked on it,” Hsia jokes. “But it was just two of us over a long period—growing, evolving, and getting too tired to redo the old stuff.”
Using humor to tell hard truths
Despite its heavy subject matter, Consume Me is intentionally funny—sometimes absurdly so. The humor isn’t just there to soften the blow; it’s an integral part of how the story is told.
“Life is already depressing. You might as well laugh before you die,” says Hsia.
Thomson takes it further: “Without humor, serious stories lose their texture. Even Shakespeare’s tragedies had jokes. Humor gives weight to the darkness.”
This approach helps the game remain accessible, offering players moments of levity amid discomfort and reflection.
Navigating a sensitive subject
The game opens with a content warning, acknowledging that its themes may be triggering for some players—especially those with lived experience of disordered eating. To reduce that risk, the team intentionally avoids real-world diet language, using fictional energy units (“Bites”) and abstracted weight systems.
Still, they know it won’t be for everyone.
“We tried to make something honest, but not harmful,” says Thomson. “If someone skips it for personal reasons, we absolutely understand.”
From diary entries to design documents
Hsia says revisiting old memories wasn’t always emotionally heavy—but as the project grew into a full release with collaborators and deadlines, it became less personal and more creative. In fact, she found revisiting old academic failures and teenage drama more affecting than the diet material.
Ultimately, making Consume Me was about turning private memories into public art, while respecting the complexity of its themes.
A new kind of food game
Consume Me is a rare project that treats difficult topics with playfulness, nuance, and a desire to explore—not just explain. It’s not a game that tells you how to feel, but one that gives you space to think.
And in a world full of overly literal health apps, restrictive goals, and gamified lifestyle tracking, that’s a refreshing inversion.
