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.

Someone knew what they liked writing description about, and found a way to empty the thesaurus to describe every kind of thing you can eat (and many things you shouldn't). Very fun and darkly silly. Reccommended.

Eat Me is an absurd, whimsical, bizarre, and often disgusting game about a child with a bottomless pit for a stomach who lives in a fantastical world where everything (and everyone) is edible. The puzzles are simple and straightforward (try eating stuff), but there's a built-in hint system in case you aren't sure what to do next. This game had me smiling throughout and occasionally laughing out loud. Highly recommended!

Sorry in advance for my wording. I am writing this at about 2:30 A.M.

I went through this story in its entirety, starting at about 1:30 A.M. Despite being exhausted due to my consistently awful sleep schedule, I thoroughly understood and enjoyed this playthrough

I have a huge thing for grotesque, surreal stories, and this one just hit every spot! The descriptions were elaborate but easy to understand. Every new discovery was somehow managed to be unexpected. The narrator's dialogue, especially as we progress through each course, becomes more and more uncomfortable to read, and I am really into that.

The puzzles themselves are quite easy, and even someone like me, who is a thick-headed novice when it comes to text adventures, got through it without much trouble.

All in all, this was a fun time-killer that I'd definitely recommend to anyone who is not eating at the moment! I think I have to take a break from cheese in general... thinking about biting into a bloated corpse leaves a nasty taste in my mouth.

(Spoiler - click to show)One night another starving soul will dream a road to my castle, and I'll dress every chamber with candy, fly bacon standards from spires that stretch into the stars. As long as stomachs grumble, mouths must eat. We'll always have a feast.

I don't want to say that I liked this game, but I applaud it. You know when you get a brilliant idea-- like genius!-- and you'd sell a family member for a piece of paper to write it down; and then by light of day, you try to decipher your scrawlings, and it's just BATPOOP INSANE? What I'm applauding is the way Chandler Groover really leaned in to that.

Some of the horror didn't quite line up with the food motif. "Overwrought" seems too wan a descriptor for the language. If you want to play along with a meth'ed out Vincent Price murmuring bloody fantasies as he straps a ball-gag onto the Swedish Chef, then follow Alph the sacred river through caverns measureless to man right up on into this story.

At first I thought this game was stupid. How much fun can a game possibly be when the only thing you can do is eat? Oh but it is much more than that. It’s not like you just sit there and repeatedly type the word eat over and over. Though the puzzles are pretty simple, they are much more complicated than they seem at first. I would recommend this game for beginners and experienced players who are just wanting something easy and fun.

The basic premise of Eat Me is that you’re a child with a hole in your stomach, and you’ve been thrown into a strange, magical castle made entirely of food. What follows is what you’d expect, and it was so much more horrifyingly enjoyable than I could have imagined.

Everything is described so deliciously in Eat Me. The writing never fails to disappoint, and the detail put into it is incredible. Even the walls and floors are edible and varied throughout the rooms. In one of my playthroughs, I just spent the entire time smelling things and it was great.

The parser voice is one of my favourite points of the game- huge spoiler ahead. (Spoiler - click to show)It made everything even more grisly to me. If the narrator is the Sugarplum Fairy and the one speaking, do you actually want to eat the six courses? In the moment just before each course is devoured, the tone of the narration changes, almost as if the parser’s arguing with someone. So the second ending, although framed as the worse one through the narrator's eyes, is actually the better- you’re breaking free.

An excellent game - original idea, wonderfully grotesque and evocative writing, a highly 'voiced' parser, and creative puzzles using a severely limited toolbox of verbs (you can do little but EXAMINE and EAT.) Your options are constrained enough that none of the puzzles are TOO hard to solve - I finished the game in about an hour and never needed the walkthrough - but they're complex enough to make you explore the castle thoroughly and think about what you're doing.

With a truly new and distinctive concept, and rock-solid, bug-free implementation, this is everything a modern parser game should be. The gruesome images may turn off a few players, but unless you've got a weak stomach, this is one morsel you shouldn't fail to sample.

Adventure game protagonists tend to be greedy-grabby types, yeah? Fitting, then, that a child is the protagonist here, with sickly sweets in the very first room. Transgression without judgment, that's what Eat Me offers, and an engaged player will quickly become complicit. Thankfully, Eat Me draws you in with a deft touch rather than going hard-meta, and even on the latter front it allows a chance of subversion by the end. It's also unabashedly weird and gross. I loved it.

On the writing: I have played many well-written games, but this is the first one I replayed primarily so I could read it again. Additionally, this game has the most effective writing I've seen used in service of the traditional exploration-and-puzzles format. It guides and instructs. It tempts and discourages. It acts as both feedback and reward. The imagery and characterization are sensuous and vivid. The writing in this game is highly suggestive, in all senses of the word, and it performs all of these tricks simultaneously without ever sacrificing the mood or being too obviously symbolic. Granted, none of the tricks Eat Me uses are new--some of them are Text Adventure Narration 101--but I haven't played any other game that balances the text and the mechanics so perfectly while operating on so many levels. It is, in a word, harmonious. Every sentence has punch, not a single word feels wasted, and the game is a joy to read and interact with.

It helps, of course, that the game is so focused and small. In fact, if there's one major criticism to be made, it's that neither the puzzles nor the story are terribly complex. I forgive Eat Me in this regard for three reasons: one, it's framed as a fairy tale, and those traditionally don't have terribly complex stories either. Two, there's a lot of optional depth to explore (again: temptation, and complicity once the player starts digging). And three, Groover packs in a variety of escalating surprises as the main events unfold. Even if you guess what's going to happen next, there's probably another layer to reflect on, an alternative that you missed, or at least an amused sense of "okay, well, I didn't expect things to go quite THAT far" afterward.

In the end, Eat Me works better as a simulation than as a captivating tale. It's a slice of Wonderland, a little model of a creepy fantasy world that you can inhabit and play around in for a while, rather than a satisfying story proper. But few games do it better or with more style.

This game was not my first playthrough of interactive fiction but it is one of my earliest ones. It definitely was a great experience. The descriptions were fantastic and the narrator's diction was a nice touch, darling. This is absolutely, positively one of my favorite games, not only because the food was spectacularly described, but because it is slightly grotesque, strange, and amazingly fantastical. Right up my alley.
I got both endings, though neither were particularly satisfying. They fit the story, however, and made sense. (Spoiler - click to show)I do wish I could have eaten her...I wonder what sort of description she would have...?
A beautiful six-course meal sure to fill your stomach. Bon appetite.