Eat Me

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I first started plaything this game I didn't really like it. It seemed confusing and I wasn't sure what my purpose was. The writing seemed thick and I had trouble getting going. There was also a shade of the grotesque to it all that I wasn't into at first. But as I stuck with it I eventually came to appreciate it more and more until I was hooked. Groover's writing is wonderful, even operatic at times. The puzzle components were kind of hard to pick out from the flowery prose, but the solutions made sense in the internal logic of the game and every time you completed a "course" the reward was great. I'll definitely play through it again sometime to see how my opinion of it has grown.

ADDENDUM: I did indeed play this game again more than a year after my initial playthrough and my appreciation for it has grown. I imagine it will be on my ballot for the Top 50 IF Games Of All Time for a very long time.

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.

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.