Jenny Jiao Hsia’s award-winning coming-of-age tale is a charming look at a teen trying her best to stay on top of things
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f you visited the V&A’s Design/Play/Disrupt exhibition in 2018, you may have played an interesting minigame collection, in which you fought wobbly physics to feed a girl named Jenny, using a Tetris-style board to achieve the perfect calorie amount, and then twisting her into pilates poses.
Almost seven years later, the full version of Consume Me, which won this year’s Independent Games festival grand prize, is set for a September release. According to developer Jenny Jiao Hsia, the game has become a semiautobiographical tale about how she felt “stupid, fat and ugly” in high school. What started as a collection of minigames about Hsia’s struggles with dieting and disordered eating grew into a game that looks at the many facets of her life as a teenager, including her relationship with her mother – who appears accompanied by Persona-style boss battle music and always finds a reason to nag – as well as her insecurities around her first long-term relationship.
Hsia and co-designer Alec “AP” Thomson have been making games together since their time studying at NYU Game Center. The duo conceived of Consume Me when Hsia showed Thomson old diaries featuring her calorie charts and notes about dieting. “I said, ‘Hey, doesn’t this look like a game?’,” she recalls. Thomson agreed. “We had a little prototype and then we got funding, and the game grew from there,” says Thomson.
