My Venba Review – A Beautiful Cooking Game With Heart
In my Venba review, I take a look at this short indie gem that serves more than just beautifully-renditioned Indian recipes. Developed by Visai Games, Venba is a cooking puzzle game that also doubles as a story-rich experience – one that will undoubtedly resonate with immigrants everywhere, and touch the hearts of non-immigrant gamers.
Game Overview
This game centers on a South Indian family who migrated to Canada in the 1980s. You play as the titular Venba, the Tamil mother striving to preserve her cultural heritage by making traditional Indian dishes despite being in a new country.
Throughout the game, you follow her, her husband Paavalan, and their son Kavin as they navigate the challenges of immigrating, particularly treading the fine line between assimilation into a new culture and keeping the old traditions alive.
Game Mechanics
I love that Venba isn’t your traditional cooking game. You won’t be tasked with planting and/or gathering materials to make your meals. Instead, the gameplay involves thoughtful puzzle mechanics rooted in trial and error, much like trying to cook without a full set of instructions or a recipe book from India.
You’re tasked to piece together partially blurred or stained Tamil cuisine recipes using cultural context or Venba’s memories. It’s like solving a mystery, where remembering how to make biryani or idlis becomes a metaphor for remembering your culture and roots.
Cooking each dish isn’t just a matter of clicking and dragging until everything is in the pot. Instead, cooking becomes an experience bearing emotional weight.
Aside from cooking challenges, Venba also advances its narrative by allowing players to make dialogue choices. There are no right or wrong answers, and choosing one over the other won’t dramatically affect the storyline. However, each option can shape the tone and nuance of the characters’ relationships.
Venba Review: Verdict
First off, Venba is a beautiful game that feels entertaining and gives an extraordinary glimpse into Tamil culture. It’s full of warmth and wonderful colors rendered in stylized 2D art.
There’s no spoken dialogue, but the silence is filled with a soundtrack full of Tamil melodies plus the crackling, sizzling sounds of cooking. It makes you feel like you’re right there in the kitchen with cooking mama Venba.
For me, what makes the game positively shine is its narrative. The immigrant experience is never easy, and Venba doesn’t shy away from showing it.
This is apparent in the form of the relationship between parents and son, with one side wanting to hold on to tradition, while the other pushes back as he grows up Canadian. The writing is nuanced and relatable, even if you’re not of Indian background.
For a very deep, emotionally resonant game, however, it is very short. For a story that spans decades, you can finish everything in about 2 hours, tops. And since making different dialogue options won’t make too much of a difference in Venba’s life, then the replayability factor can be a bit low.
Still, if you’re a fan of games that offer a wonderful mix of flavor, emotion, and warmth that linger even after putting down the controller, then Venba is sure to hit the spot.
Venba is available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Steam.
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