Consume Me: The College Project That Became an IGF Grand Prize Winner
Jenny Jiao Hsia turned the worst parts of high school into a funny, painful life-sim about food, bodies and control. It started as a student capstone and ended up sweeping the IGF. Here is why it is worth playing now.
Few store pages open with a confession. Consume Me's does: "did you feel stupid, fat, lazy, and ugly in high school? well i did...but at least i made a life-simulation RPG about it!" The lowercase is deliberate. So is the joke. And underneath both is one of the most honest games about eating disorders ever made.
Consume Me is a semi-autobiographical game by Jenny Jiao Hsia and AP Thomson, published by Hexecutable. It came out on Windows and macOS in September 2025 and on iPhone and iPad on 2 June 2026. Before it was even released, it won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the 2025 Independent Games Festival, along with the Nuovo and WINGS awards.
A teenager's day, as a stack of minigames
The game follows a fictional version of Hsia as a teenager. Each day you plan her schedule, splitting limited time between activities that play out as short, inventive minigames: eating a meal, exercising, putting on makeup, studying. How well you do changes her energy, mood and money, and those numbers decide what tomorrow looks like.
It sounds playful, and it often is. The art is scrappy and hand-drawn, the jokes are sharp, and the minigames are genuinely fun to master. That is the trick. As the days go on, the game's systems start to mirror the logic of disordered eating: every meal becomes a puzzle to optimise, every calorie a resource to manage. You feel the pull of "winning" at the very thing that is hurting her.
Two friends from NYU
Hsia and Thomson met as students at the NYU Game Center and have worked together for years, including on the earlier game Beglitched. On Consume Me they split the work clearly. Hsia prototyped the minigames, set the art direction, wrote the story and built the non-interactive scenes. Thomson programmed most of the game, designed its systems and contributed text and a musical sequence.
The supporting team was small: Ken "coda" Snyder composed the soundtrack, Violet W-P handled sound design, and Jie En Lee created much of the art. The game was built in Unity.
How it was received
Consume Me holds a Metacritic score of 80 on PC, and 84% of critics on OpenCritic recommend it. It kept collecting honours long after its IGF night:
- IGF 2025: Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Nuovo Award, WINGS Award; also nominated for design, narrative and visual art.
- Game Developers Choice Awards 2026: Social Impact award, plus honourable mentions for Best Debut and the Innovation Award.
- The Game Awards 2025: nominated for Games for Impact.
- BAFTA Games Awards 2026: nominated for Debut Game and Game Beyond Entertainment.
- Golden Joystick Awards 2025: nominated for Best Indie Game (Self Published).
Why it matters
Games about mental health often feel like lessons. Consume Me feels like a memory, specific enough to be uncomfortable and funny enough to keep you going. By making you enjoy the systems before showing what they cost, it says something about eating disorders that a cutscene could not: how logical they can feel from the inside.
It also shows how long a "debut" can take. From student project to museum prototype to Grand Prize to App Store, Consume Me's journey took the better part of a decade.
Where to play
Consume Me is on Steam for Windows and macOS, and on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. Because it deals with disordered eating and body image, some players may find parts of it difficult. For more IGF winners, see our guide to the Grand Prize.