Consume Me got me to stop save-scumming and delete perfectionism

It’s nearing one in the morning, and I’ve consumed somewhere in the ballpark of three coffees and two energy drinks so I have the time and energy to study for my upcoming calc and bio exams, do my lit reading, exercise at least twice, sell some outfits I never wear to make a quick buck, and maybe, if I have a couple spare seconds, take a bath to recharge my energy and improve my mood. I over-ate today, but I needed to fill up my guts, so I’ll write it off as a cheat day, which means I can now eat whatever I want. Down the hatch the chips go. Hey, I need it to get rid of my munchies debuff so I can get back to studying.

This is not only a reenactment of my early college years (if you swapped STEM finals with writing 15-page papers); it’s also the chapter of Jenny Jiao Hsia’s game Consume Me that was the most stressful for me to play. A physical knot of tension formed in my chest as I deliberated the best way to spend time in-game, the same knot of tension I felt when staying up as a college student to finish every single assignment in one productive, awful push. Failure to apportion time correctly in Consume Me would mean I’d fail to meet the protagonist’s goals, which would mean — as the protagonist said to herself in the mirror —remaining the same person, thus doomed to a wretched existence of self-hatred and worthlessness. It’s a plight I understood intimately. I frequently rectified my in-game mistakes the only way I knew how: deleting them from the very universe itself by loading old saves. It was during this college crashout chapter of the game that my partner, who was watching me play, said, “Sweetie, you can’t deal with imperfection.”