Video Game / Avril’s Appetite

This page contains unmarked spoilers for Avril's Appetite. You Have Been Warned.

"Avril's Appetite is a game starring AVRIL, who just LOVES stuffing her big doughy belly full of cake!!!"

— The tagline of Avril's Appetite.

Avril's Appetite is an erotic game made by Lachevite, intended to appeal to the fat admirer demographic. It was released on Itch.io on November 4th, 2023, and the creator regarded it as their most ambitious project at the time.

The game stars Avril, who, according to the game's advertising, loves eating lots of cake, along with the resulting consequences that come with doing so. However, what seems to be a straightforward feeding game quickly gets flipped on its head when Avril loudly refuses to participate. After chiding the player for daring to subject her to this treatment, she presents them with her game's beta so she can be left alone. What follows is an exploration of Avril's character as the game continuously tries forcing her back into the role it had planned for her.

Everything that happens after playing through the beta treks into spoiler territory, but suffice to say, the game was made with special attention given to its story. It is quite upfront about the bleaker subtext it has regarding the community it appeals to.

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Tropes in this game:

• Balloon Belly:
  • Ostensibly, the purpose of Avril's Appetite is to feed cake to the titular character and watch her belly expand to massive size. At first, Avril only swallows a single piece of cake early on, giving her a noticeable paunch for most of the game. It doesn't get larger sooner because she successfully fights against the game's attempts to feed her further for a while... until The endgame. By that point, the game has free reign to stuff Avril rapidly, and she balloons to such a large size that the game can't contain her, with her belly visibly pressing up against the screen as the game runs out of memory.
  • The Chow Wow mini-game uses the protagonist's expanding belly as a gameplay mechanic. Eating enough food causes her to grow in size; the added weight lowers the arc of her jumps, making it progressively harder to eat every bit of food onscreen.
  • The Mine Eater mini-game is based on the classic Mine Sweeper PC game, complete with a smiley face reacting to the player's progress. This time, the smiley-face has a body of her own, and if the player performs well, she'll progressively gain weight.
• Big Beautiful Woman: Avril is plus-sized from the very beginning, being mostly bottom-heavy with a decently-sized muffin-top, to boot. Much to her chagrin, her size is meant to be titilating to her game's audience, especially thanks to the advertising's promise that they can make her even wider.
• The Cameo:
  • The heroes and fat characters that appear behind Avril as she explains her dreams and fears to the player are all existing characters from different artists and properties.
  • Several of the Idol Idle enemies are actually preexisting characters designed by other prominent artists in the fat fetish community, all of whom collaborated with Lachevite to complete Avril's Appetite.
• Death by Gluttony: Being force-fed several cake slices leads to Avril gaining far too much weight in very little time. Her expansive size ultimately overloads the game's memory, and she involuntarily crashes it for good, taking herself with it. While backups exist on the game's desktop to allow players to replay the game, the original Avril's Appetite application can't run due to missing a critical file: "objAvril"—Avril herself.
• Deconstruction: The premise of Avril's Appetite explores the consequences of non-consensual feederism, and how obsessing over the fetish can lead to devaluing the people involved in it, especially the feedee. The message manifests itself in a couple different ways:
  • The beta version of Avril's Appetite is in a deeply unfinished state. The most complete asset is the sprite of Avril herself; to the developers, the goal of fattening her up took precedence over every other aspect of the game during the beta period. Even then, this Avril doesn't have her own voice; various text-to-speech programs read out her dialogue instead, symbolising how Avril's actual voice ultimately doesn't matter when it comes to the direction of her game—or even her life.
  • Avril clearly isn't in the mood to gorge, and when feeling vulnerable, she quickly admits to the player why: she aspires to become a well-respected video-game character, and the expectations thrust upon her as a fetish game protagonist actively impedes her goals. She does briefly get a chance to fulfill her hopes and dreams when she unintentionally transforms the game into Idol Idle. But between the abundance of fellow fat ladies she fights and the bare-bones nature of the game overall, it is clearly fabricated by the program she's in as another means to blindside her with more fattening cake. The second she swallows the next piece from a glitching scoreboard avatar, there is no other choice for the player than to stuff her until she and the game break, completely disregarding her desires for the game's own until her death.
  • The game goes out of its way to demonize both Avril's Appetite's in-universe publisher and a mysterious figure who shows up in a second playthrough. The former has an implied connection to a cult thanks to a post-game mini-game, and the latter is rendered as an unsettling, shadowy monster, hinted to be directly responsible for Avril's treatment.
• Defiant to the End: The endgame sees Avril left anchored by her weight gain and extremely tired out as the game tries fattening her up with the final slices of cake. Even still, she has enough energy to resist swallowing, holding the last three slices inside her cheeks as they're forced into her... until her reflexes decide her fate. The sudden weight gain crashes the game and kills her.
• Establishing Character Moment: The game opens with an adult content warning and very prominently features a plump belly to illustrate its point. Suddenly, Avril interjects and brutally kicks the warning screen aside, declaring that she refuses to participate in the game's premise. Before she presents the player with her game's unfinished beta, all attempts to feed her cake lead to her violently tossing each slice aside.
  Avril: I'M NOT GONNA GORGE MYSELF ON CAKE! I'M NOT GONNA THROW MY ARMS BACK AND START BURPING! I'M NOT GONNA START BURSTING OUT OF MY CLOTHES... And I'm NOT going to be a part of this STUPID game. You might as well just shut the game off now... because NOTHING is going to happen!
• Evil, Inc.: Upon fulfilling certain criteria, the player can play a foreboding mini-game that strongly hints at Gotis Publishing's ties to the occult. They are tasked with searching through empty folders to find a picture of the company's mascot, the crudely drawn Capybara found when Avril bypasses the boulder in Idol Idle. The desktop background transforms into a drawing of a Capybara's skull, complete with tendons trailing beneath it. Considering the details surrounding the mysterious Jester haunting Avril throughout a second playthrough, it's clear this company has some hand in Avril's situation, as well.
• Fiery Redhead: The red-headed Avril is nothing like how the game's trailer presents her as, at least not within the context of the game. Due to being forced into the game's premise, she's constantly agitated and brutally defiant; at one point, she throws a slice of cake off screen so hard that it explodes. She's even quite feisty when she's finally at peace as Idol Idle's protagonist; she's enamored with the opportunity to swing a sword at foes and grow stronger.
• Foreshadowing: The beta Avril presents the player with ends when a level border fails to load, allowing the cake within to be dragged outside and into Avril’s mouth. This foreshadows the overall game's willingness to break its own rules and destroy itself, just to keep its stuffing premise intact.
• H-Game: Avril's Appetite is a belly stuffing game explicitly intended for adults, with a big focus on fattening up the title character for the player's enjoyment. However, there is a narrative within the game that offers some commentary on some less-than-savory aspects of the community that the game is marketed towards.
• Hidden Depths:
  • The first few times Avril is fed cake, her expression becomes blissful as her face is surrounded by hearts, implying she does enjoy being indulgent. She just doesn't want to be forced into it when she's not in the mood, and especially not if it's going to impede her hopes and dreams.
  • As she reveals her dream to the player, Avril imagines some fairly obscure protagonists she wishes to be like, such as a character from PsyCard or the titular protagonist from an old LEGO flash game called Junkbot. The fact she wishes to be on their level—and not characters more famous or well-known—implies her end-goal is humbler than she makes it out to be in her frustration. Conversely, the three characters she negatively compares her fattened self to are all relatively popular, especially in the weight-gain community—Touhou's Patchouli, Rayman Origins' Edith Up, and Skullgirls' Filia.
• Idle Game: Avril's so outraged that the player managed to sneak some cake into her that she forcibly glitches the game into another one of a different genre entirely: Idol Idle. True to its title, it is an idle game with fantasy-RPG elements with Avril as the protagonist. She loves being a part of it, regarding it as a breath of fresh air from all the cake shenanigans she's dealt with up to this point. Unfortunately for her, the game isn't done feeding her just because it changed; it's just biding its time until it presents some crucial options to the player, allowing them to fulfill the game's original premise by force.
• I Just Want to Be Badass: Utterly disgusted with the fetish game she's a part of, Avril wishes to become a well-regarded action heroine in another video-game. The program briefly bends to her wishes after she throws a fit and overloads it with junk data; it transforms itself into an RPG idling game in which Avril is tasked with slaying every creature that opposes her. She's at her happiest here, estatic to finally be in a "real game" by her standards while gleefully rubbing her victory into the player's face. However, some of her dialogue implies she's aware that there isn't much going on in the game she's now a part of.
  Avril: ... You're still here? What, you think something is gonna happen... and suddenly, a bunch of cake is gonna start appearing out of nowhere, or something stupid like that? Get a grip, you loser! I'm in a real game now! I'm too busy having... intricate game mechanics... and, uh... a compelling storyline... to care about whatever it is you want. So why don't you just get lost?
  [Avril continues being a part of Idol Idle, a game that lacks the very things she claims to be enjoying now.]
• Mirror Character: The protagonist of the Chow Wow mini-game is Avril's polar opposite. She actively wants to over-indulge on food, even as the added weight makes it harder to continue feeding. A bonus image shown after the mini-game is complete reveals that she has the agency to exercise and shake off the extra weight, presumably so she can continue eating without worry. She's a much more traditional protagonist for fat kink games, especially Lachevite’s, whose other protagonists generally treat weight-gain as a mild inconvenience at worst. Meanwhile, Avril spent most of her screen-time prior actively protesting the genre conventions holding her back, all while her agency is removed and she's unable to lose her surplus weight.
• Monster Clown: A second playthrough of the game reveals the secret main antagonist of the game. They are rendered in silhouette, but one of their most recognizable details is a large jester hat. While elusive, the times they do appear clearly paint them as a sinister figure in the game's narrative; they are the one responsible for subjecting Avril to everything that happens in this game.
  • As Avril muses about the video game champions she idolizes, the figure suddenly appears behind her, leering at the viewer with its wide eyes and huge irises.
  • If the player spends long enough on Idol Idle, glitchy text appears across the screen saying "cake," along with large arrows pointing to the score submission button. Both assets are colored the same blue as the figure, as if they're impatiently hurrying the player into Avril's final forced feast.
  • The scene in which Avril scowls at the camera and hurls insults at the player is redrawn to have the figure reflected within her eyes. This completely changes the context of the scene and implies she's been lashing out at them this whole time.
  • The player can attempt to launch Donut Date 2 once the second playthrough is complete. This time, they won't be met with an error message. Instead, the figure abruptly appears, staring at the viewer before crashing the game back to the player's actual desktop.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The trailer for Avril's Appetite consists of Avril cordially inviting the viewer to stuff her with as much cake as she can take. This lines up with the game's tagline, but it is completely at odds with how she's portrayed in the game proper, where she's temperamental and hates being a part of this game in any capacity. She does everything in her power to avoid eating cake, to no avail.
• New Game Plus: After certain conditions are met, the backups of Avril's Appetite offer some additional details in each scene, providing slightly more context surrounding Avril's predicament. It seems a shadowy entity is responsible for forcing her into this cake game, and a few scenes are redrawn to show them appearing near her. Their last appearance is the scene in which Avril screams insults at the player; the still of her glaring into the camera now includes reflections of the entity in her eyes, implying she's been addressing them this whole time.
• Non Sequitur: Early in a second playthrough, the mini Avril in the beta mini-game will eventually say something different from the onscreen text, and completely unrelated to the gameplay. Instead of admiring how big her belly has become, she describes an animal similar to a guinea pig, but with longer legs. She's talking about a Capybara—the same creature used as Gotis Publishing's mascot.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When the player manages to force-feed cake into her during the idle-game segment, Avril tries forcing the game to crash again in retaliation. Unfortunately, this blows up spectacularly in her face; the resulting glitching only allows the player to feed her more cake. Realizing her life is at stake, Avril drops her aggression, pleading with the player to stop and taking back every insult she gave them. She even stops reacting to each slice with bliss, paying more immediate attention to her weight gain with increasing apprehension... But several cakes in, a heavily fattened Avril gives in to her impulses and half-consciously urges the player to finish the job.
  Avril: C-C... C-Cake...
  [With a look of arousal mixed with utter defeat, Avril lets her mouth hang open for the last few slices of cake.]
• Scary Teeth: Avril's teeth are consistently shark-like whenever they're visible—even as early as the game's promotional image. It's the first hint towards her aggressive defiance that allows her to stave off the game's hold over her for a while.
• Stylistic Suck: To placate the player and keep them from force-feeding her cake, Avril presents them with Avril's Appetite's beta, a maze-game where players must navigate cake past demons to a tiny, disinterested Avril in the upper right corner of the screen. Just as Avril says, it is clearly unfinished; the background is a Shutterstock image, the little Avril cycles through different, crudely-done text-to-speech voices to express her enjoyment of being fed, and the level-design is incomplete—to the point where some assets are unable to load. The last issue proves to be the actual Avril's undoing, as the border of the final level isn't fully loaded, allowing the player to remove the cake from the game and shove it into Avril's mouth.
• Wham Line: After stuffing Avril beyond capacity and causing the game to crash, the player is presented with an in-game desktop with the option to play the game again. They can do so through one of four backups, representing the different chapters... Or they can try reopening Avril's Appetite through its own shortcut. This only causes an error message to appear, and it succinctly clears up any doubt over Avril's fate:
  ''ERROR.'' Unable to find object "objAvril"
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Avril ends up having the time of her life as the main character of Idol Idle, but after a few minutes of playing the game, the player is presented with the option to submit their current score. To do so, they're first tasked with preparing an avatar for themselves... and the only one that is able to work is a picture of a slice of cake. Due to a glitch, the player is able to submit their score enough times to cause the score list to rise—with the final score listing shoving its cake avatar into Avril's mouth and fattening her up once again. At this point, there's no turning back; despite Avril's attempts to break the game again, the score submission screen and its associated glitch are still present. The glitch ends up force-feeding more cake into Avril until she and the game can't take anymore.

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