If you settle for the obtained knowledge that the Sport awards are the Oscars of the interactive business, then you possibly can say the Impartial Video games Competition is its Cannes, and the Seumas McNally Grand prize its Palme d’Or. So that you’d assume the discharge of this yr’s winner could be extensively and loudly trumpeted. Not so. Eat Me’s apparently underwhelming early gross sales and shocking lack of critiques communicate extra to ongoing problems with discoverability (and busy critics battling an autumn glut) than the sport itself, which is an absolute delight.
Admittedly, it’s straightforward to make it sound like one thing you ought to play reasonably than one thing you’d actually need 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 making an attempt to drop some weight whereas navigating the stresses and pitfalls of teenage life. It includes environment friendly administration of vitality and time. A content material discover warns about themes of bullying, fatphobia and disordered consuming. It’s additionally – in some way – certainly one of 2025’s funniest video games.
Eat Me deftly negotiates this tonal minefield, playfully however incisively satirising the gamification of weight loss plan tradition. Protagonist Jenny’s mealtimes are abstracted into puzzle kind. In a course of that jogged my memory of arranging Leon’s attaché case in Resident Evil 4, you fit foodstuffs formed like Tetris blocks right into a grid representing Jenny’s abdomen. L-shaped kale and S-shaped tomatoes will preserve you underneath your each day goal (crucially, she’s not counting energy however “bites”) whereas eggs handily plug these awkward single areas. Junk meals are available appealingly handy shapes – however filling up with a cookie means spending your treasured free time making an attempt to burn it off, or utilizing up certainly one of your restricted cheat days. Depart any gaps and her abdomen will rumble, which means she’s more likely to want a snack later.
You’ll additionally have to preserve Jenny’s vitality and temper above zero or it’s sport over. That’s simple at first: the duties that make up your schedule, from chores to learning to making use of make-up, comprise easy however enjoyable minigames with the antic vitality of Nintendo’s WarioWare collection however little of the problem. Gadgets earned or purchased with pocket cash make it simpler nonetheless to maintain Jenny completely happy and wholesome. However time is the enemy, and balancing wants and needs turns into steadily trickier. Depend on vitality drinks too typically, for example, and a caffeine headache awaits, which means any exercise however mattress relaxation will make you grumpy.
Whether or not issues are going properly or not, it’s superbly noticed. Ominous music accompanies the weekly weigh-in, as you bodily drag Jenny’s ft on to the scales. Cleansing the lavatory is adopted by a forensic inspection out of your overbearing mom, who leans in near scrutinise your handiwork, urgent her index finger towards the sink to make sure it comes away spotless. When Jenny first meets boyfriend Oliver’s well-to-do mother and father, the easy introduction of an nervousness meter is sufficient to have your individual coronary heart beating a bit of sooner, even earlier than her creativeness casts his prying mom as a trenchcoated detective, a highlight including to the interrogative vibe. And within the couple’s first try at making out, their clumsy limbs crisscross the display, forcing you to manoeuvre spherical them to lock lips.
Love quickly turns into one other obligation, and thus a supply of pressure, shrewdly re-contextualised in every chapter. Jenny can’t miss too most of the potential dates she pencils in her diary, however a visit to a pizza restaurant forces her to be strict together with her consuming for the remainder of the week. When Oliver goes to school, Jenny should make investments invaluable night time texting or video-calling him, satisfied their long-distance relationship will take “poison injury” day by day if she doesn’t. (By evening, she presses her face towards a glass case, tearfully watching petals fall from the rose inside it, brilliantly evoking the best way every thing turns into a melodrama at that age.)
This is likely to be a sport about routines, however regardless of some purposeful repetition, Eat Me by no means totally settles into certainly one of its personal; it retains discovering ingenious makes use of (and reuses) of methods to punch house its themes with out shedding its sense of humour. In case you have an uneasy relationship with meals and private health, there are moments that can hit near house – and even in case you eat and train properly, you may certainly relate to being too busy with life’s necessities to search out room for the stuff you’d reasonably be doing.
Once more, although, I’m cautious of creating it sound an excessive amount of like consuming your greens. This spiky, humorous, and bracingly authentic sport consumed just a few laughter- and tear-filled evenings, and left recollections that can stick with me a very good deal longer.
