It’s easy to dismiss the challenges other people face. As a white male born and still living in the UK, I have never been the object of racism, nor have I had to experience being an immigrant who gave up everything for a better life. I often see stories in the news exploring these areas, but it’s always a challenge to directly connect with them without experiencing them firsthand. Visai Games hopes to address that with its new narrative cooking game, Venba.
This beautifully animated indie game is about an Indian family, mostly the mother, who is conveniently named Venba. The family left India in the 1990s for a fresh start in Canada, and the story seeks to explore the hardships they faced and the wonderful surprises along the way, all while tying the game together with two main gameplay elements; branching dialogue and a cooking segment.
The story is short, and the whole story can be completed in a maximum of two hours. You’ll start with a young Venba as she and her husband grapple with financial insecurity and the difficulty of being a foreign-educated immigrant looking to enter the workforce in a first-world country. After a while, the time jumps and the family has expanded with a young son who is trying to find his place in the world as a boy of Tamil descent and Canadian citizenship. After more hardships and very touching scenes, time jumps forward again until the young boy is ready to leave for college and finally pushes his family away in search of more personal freedom. These time jumps keep happening until the story ends with an old Venba who finds peace after a very challenging and demanding life.
The story is charming and sad, emotional yet rewarding. It’s a true and honest story, and although unfortunately there’s no spoken dialogue, only written text, you get a good sense of who these characters are, what drives them, and their personalities. Although, it’s worth mentioning that a lot of this title’s personality comes not from the narrative and dialogue, but from the culinary parts that weave together small convoluted systems with memories.
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These parts of Venba require you to cook and create a series of Tamil dishes. Think Cooking Mama, where instead of playing the game to set a high score or get the best score, you have to make these dishes to commemorate an occasion in Venba’s life. Whether she’s finding out she’s pregnant or preparing her son for college, Venba has grown-up meals, and she cooks them with the help of a scrapbook of cookbooks that’s been passed down through generations in her family. The problem, however, is that the recipes wear out pretty badly, with parts of each recipe being smeared or missing, and you have to use the Venba’s memory or just problem solving or your own intuition to create meals that are exactly as they should be prepared. I won’t comment on the authenticity of the recipes as I’m not a Tamil cook, but I will say that the art style works wonders and makes every meal look absolutely delicious.
I do think the game could benefit from more complex recipe puzzles, as some of the solutions are so simple that they hardly challenge anything. I can understand that the purpose of the game is to be accessible, but you can keep the game mechanics very simple while providing more challenging puzzles to keep the player mentally on their toes.
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But regardless, for a very short indie game, Venba is a fun, thought-provoking, emotional story worth checking out. The culinary gameplay and engaging narrative, matched with a striking and colorful South Indian food-inspired color palette, make for an experience well worth spending 1-2 hours to complete.
