Eat Me

I decided to play this game because the author, Chandler Groover, mentioned in the postmortem for The Bat that “Few people seemed to identify ‘consumerism’ as a theme in Eat Me, even though I felt like I was screaming through a megaphone.” That got me curious about it. (It also biased my playthrough to look for this theme. How dreadful for me to have to consume consciously.)

Eat Me is a parser game where you play as a child who has apparently entered into a Faustian bargain with the narrator to be able to eat endlessly. The experience of eating your way through the mysterious fairy tale castle and its succulent inhabitants is a vivid nightmare of consumption, seamlessly intertwining the pleasure and horror of amoral gluttony.

The only source of gameplay friction I encountered—other than my own emotional reactions to the imagery in the writing—involved navigation woes. During about 35 minutes of my 1h55m playthrough, I was stuck, knowing conceptually how to solve several puzzles but unable to find components for those puzzles. For instance, I had discovered a use for the crow, but it had long since departed the map to feast elsewhere. Using the “think” command was not helpful whatsoever, as it only pointed me to solutions I had already become aware of. (Like, yes, I know that I need soil, but there isn’t any!) Because of how otherwise fluid and seamless the gameplay was, I was reluctant to look up the answers as the game had assured me many times that it was impossible to get soft-locked.

When I finally caved and looked at the map, I was aghast at my persistent mistake. It turns out, my mental image of a “pantry” as a space that has only one entrance (like a closet) was stubborn enough to fully override the room description that I had been shown five times, and I never once noticed it had a west exit. As the player, ultimately, it is my responsibility to manage navigation and see all the exits from the room. I do get that! But nevertheless, since I failed to do so, the in-game hint system was unable to account for this and only irritated me by giving me a set of information that was orthogonal to the problem I was having. It makes me wonder, as a minor game design note for the future, if it is possible for the game to have noticed that I had never entered rooms that I had access to, and prioritize that as a hint when “think”-ing.

Anyway, enough on that. Here’s what I really wanted to discuss. (Oh, and just bear in mind, from this point onward, spoilers abound. It’s hard to talk about something like this game while inhibited by spoiler tags. If you have yet to play and are not sufficiently deterred by the content warnings, this game does have my recommendation.)

One of the things I’ve been pondering after finishing this game, perhaps strangely, is the relationship between the architecture of the castle and the grotesque fluidity of the carnage within. Eat Me is inescapably organic in its environment: lard oozes; candles drip; rinds give way to soft cheese that splats; sardines slip as they are slurped. I’m sure you get what I mean. Meanwhile, the castle stands, rigid and inedible and inflexible with its cardinal directions, order imposed onto this seething ouroboros of growth, rot, s**t, and death.

At least, at first. Over the course of the, well, courses, the castle hollows, sogs, and crumbles, picked clean like the ribs forming the chandelier. The perverse fluidity of milk and soup fissure through the order of the castle, eventually leaving behind little more than a spine-shaped hallway from the drawbridge to the chapel, the castle a carcass. By consuming the story and its attendant puzzles, the reader carves through it—due to the nonlinearity of the puzzle order—following the path of least resistance as they eat. The motion of narrative consumption mimics what is happening to the castle, and on a smaller scale what happens each time the protagonist eats something.

Returning to architecture, the other element I wanted to discuss is the verticality of the game, and specifically, the emphasis on descent as the primary motion of progress. As I played—if you can stomach forgiving my less-than-normatively-literary references—I kept thinking about the location “Ancient Cistern” from The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. This location presents itself in two parts: an opulent, gilded layer on top, serene and beautiful; which then reveals a hellish, dark, rotting cavern beneath. Mechanically, you are meant to traverse the two halves, which are ultimately inseparable. You cannot have the paradise of wealth without the dismal horror beneath.

Eat Me’s castle is not as neatly partitioned, but there is still a distinct difference between above and below. The moat is full of “nightsoil” (which the game taught me is a euphemism for “s**t”). The dungeon is full of mold, torture devices, and corpses, that will never disappear. The corpses in particular are persistent; in my desperation to get the crow back after it flew away, I made a point of trying to eat all of them hoping to perhaps become just disgusting enough to tempt its return. (Cursed, I know, but it’s a cursed game. It’s hard to say if that’s even the worst thing that the player can eat.) These “low” locations contain what is required to support the Baron’s (and other denizens’) lavish lifestyle. The filth cannot be scrubbed clean; you are required to descend into it again and again.

Consider the stark difference between ascent and descent. Upward motion involves climbing completely banal staircases (with the exception being, perhaps, the chandelier, though that is quite a temporary ascension). Downward motion is comparatively dramatic: dragging a guard through a grate into a vat of sour milk; a guard falling through into the nightsoil-moat; a torrent of soup dragging you down into the undercroft; a torrent of cream dragging you down into the moat; pouncing down onto an anthropomorphic salad named Jenny from above; descending the stairs to witness the torture behind the godly visage of the cow; and perhaps most significantly, descending in digestion through the Baron’s four stomachs that unravel his psyche as you go, witnessing the carnage that it took to sustain him and his castle. I can’t help but be reminded of the children’s game Chutes and Ladders, where “orderly” actions take you up the rigid ladders, and “sinful/antisocial” actions send you down the sinuous slides.

Eat Me is a plane of Hell devoted to gluttony, tormenting you with endless want and the grisly stakes of that want, sending you downward again and again, and at long last (in one ending at least) burning you in an infernal oven to be feasted upon by an audience of fey onlookers, as if Hansel and Gretel were a Black Mirror bacchanal.

This game is a beautiful and terrible thing, both sensuous and senseless. Its horrors bite back.