Beware, reader, for unwrapping and devouring this advent post will take you over your Bite limit for the day, adding multiple paragraphs to your waistline and forever postponing the onset of your Hot Girl Summer. Still, this is a slimmer post at around 400 words. If you’ve been laying off the fatty intros this week, and you’re expert at rotating things to fit your inventory, you might be able to justify the snack.

What videogame could get you thinking about the carb content of a videogame article? It can only be… Consume Me!

Edwin: If you’re looking for the Baby Steps of dieting simulations, 1) your tastes are aggressively particular, and I’d love to see your backlog 2) give Consume Me a whirl. It’s a furiously inventive and funny slice-of-life RPG with a heart or more accurately, stomach of darkness. You are a girl who wants to shed a few pounds, while staying on top of other Adult Responsibilities like laundry, dog-walking, romancing your hot neighbour, appeasing your hellmom, and bossing your make-up routine ahead of a big party.

To carry out these tasks, you sink your hands and teeth into a wonderful minigame smorgasbord – yes, I do dare deploy the generally editor-forbidden word “smorgasbord” in this context. Stuffing Tetronimoes of bacon into an awkward grid layout, dragging your character’s Cheestring limbs around during a workout, clicking rhythmically to seesaw yourself and your preposterous Pomeranian down the pavement… It’s WarioWare if Wario needed to cut his cholesterol, but it’s also thematically and formally consistent, for all the inanity. The presentation suggests a Flash animation of somebody’s childhood crayola drawing of a really neat DS pet game.

It’s zippy, colourful, and a really great videogame comedy, with snort-inducing sound effects. You’ll play very few games that have Consume Me’s sense of timing. That said, the humour is cut with self-loathing, so maybe think twice about playing this if you’re having trouble looking at yourself in the mirror. Although you might find the character’s difficulties cathartic to behold, if you’re having body shame issues. You are a beautiful person by the way. Fatphobes can go eat toothpaste.

Be prepared, also, for an eventual twist born of Consume Me’s autobiographical origins that may surprise and perhaps, throw you off, given the general countercultural feeling of the game. I don’t think it spoils anything, though I’d like to write about it more. But mostly I’d like more of you to play this so we can push more for more minigame-driven RPGs. Distractions? Harumph and pshaw! Consume Me is evidence that you can make a meal of these scattered pieces in the best of ways.

Julian: To any readers disturbed by Edwin’s flagrant use of the forbidden word, know that this is not a sign of relaxing standards. As Graham did before me, and Katharine did before him, anyone who is found to use ‘smorgasbord’ or any of the other banned words, such as ‘visceral’, ‘very unique’, or ‘hoplite’ shall be appropriately punished. For his sins, Edwin has been sent to a buffet convention where he will be forced to sample a smorgasbord of smorgasbords.