How this innovative indie game uses cute, lo-fi art to hide a serious message – and why its creator hates talking about it

Jenny Jiao Hsia, the creator behind indie game Consume Me, admits that she’s much more of a visual artist because she struggles to express herself in other ways. “I hate words,” she tells me. “I’m so bad at expressing myself through words, and I want to get a lot better at it because I’m making TikToks right now, and I’ve realised I’m not good at figuring out what to say on the fly consistently. So I think a lot about communicating things in pictures or storyboards.”

Consume Me is certainly very visually distinct, as a light-hearted coming-of-age life sim that’s based on Hsia’s own experiences with dieting and eating disorder as a teenager, played out like an RPG with WarioWare-style minigames. Made in Unity, It’s also purposely lo-fi in execution with its thick brushstrokes and simple shapes, though more raw, expressive, and human than any AI-generated assets could ever be.

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Alan Wen is a freelance journalist writing about video games in the form of features, interview, previews, reviews and op-eds. Work has appeared in print including Edge, Official Playstation Magazine, GamesMaster, Games TM, Wireframe, Stuff, and online including Kotaku UK, TechRadar, FANDOM, Rock Paper Shotgun, Digital Spy, The Guardian, and The Telegraph.