Venba Review – A Light Yet Nourishing Meal

A great meal, particularly one prepared by somebody you love, is one of the great joys a person can experience — literally the stuff of life — and so it’s unsurprising that multiple video games have attempted to tackle the subject of cooking over the years. Series like Overcooked and Cooking Mama have provided entertaining arcade experiences, but it would be a stretch to say they’ve really captured the nuances of cooking. Venba, a new game from first-time indie developer Visai Games takes a much more specific, heartfelt approach to the cooking genre, focusing on the experiences of first-generation Tamil Canadians, their children, and the food that bonds them.

Is Venba a perfectly-seasoned new take on the cooking genre? Or did the recipe go wrong somewhere along the way? Let’s dig in…

When we first meet the titular Venba, she’s just recently arrived in Canada and very obviously pregnant (although her husband hasn’t quite clued into that fact yet). The couple moved from South India in hopes of forging a better life, but the Canadian dream remains maddeningly out of grasp. Potential employers don’t recognize their degrees and look down on their lack of “relevant Canadian experience.” They’re isolated and adrift, but they decide to stay for the sake of their child.

We continue to see Venba’s life in snapshots as her son Kavin grows up. In a cruel irony suffered by many immigrant parents, Kavin integrates into Canadian society just as Venba hoped he would, but the effort to fit in drives a wedge between him and his parents. He wants them to call him “Kevin” instead of Kavin and can’t speak Tamil well, making basic communication with his parents challenging (the developers smartly signify this by making Kavin’s speech balloons slightly smudged and difficult to read). Venba tries to connect the best way she knows how, through food, but Kavin even tries to push that away, demanding pizza and rejecting lunches she makes for him.

Without giving too much away, the story eventually goes to some dark places, some sad places, but not without plenty of hopeful moments to balance things out. The makers of Venba have crafted a story that’s relatable on several levels. Of course, Tamil families will likely see a lot of themselves in these characters, but immigrant families from all backgrounds ought to find things to relate to here. Even more broadly, all parents who have struggled and hit “dead ends” as they try to provide the best possible life for their kids, and those kids who only realize later in life what their parents did for them, should be moved by this story. This is the kind of subtle, grounded writing we don’t see enough of in video games.

But hey, what about the cooking? Unlike Cooking Mama’s minigames or Overcooked’s time and resource management, cooking in Venba is essentially structured like a puzzle. Venba’s cookbook, passed down by her own mother, has seen better days. Pieces of pages are missing or unreadable, forcing you to figure what to do despite the lack of information. Later on, an extra layer of complexity is added as Kavin steps into the kitchen and we see the recipes through his eyes – eyes that don’t read Tamil particularly well.

Venba is maybe the best distillation of the cooking process I’ve encountered in a game and I felt like I actually learned something about Tamil cooking in the process. Don’t expect typical Westernized Indian restaurant dishes – no chicken tikka masala here. Instead, you’ll be drooling over biriyani (a layered rice dish) and nattu kozhi kulambu (a sort of homey chicken-curry soup). As I worked my way through Venba’s various meals, I found myself picking up tips (Always put the tomatoes in last!) in early dishes that I eventually put to use later in later, tougher challenges. Am I going to be able to cook like a Tamil grandma now? Heck no, but I feel like I have a better appreciation of what goes into this type of cooking.

The cooking process is further brought to life by excellent presentation. Venba offers up charming storybook-style visuals during its narrative bits, but a whole other level of attention has been paid to the cooking. Dishes look good enough to eat, and while you sadly can’t smell them, everything sounds fantastic — the crackling of spices in oil, the hiss of steam escaping from a long-simmering pot, ect. On top of this, an excellent original soundtrack inspired by Tamil movies provides just the right ambiance.

Venba is a wonderfully immersive experience, but sadly, it’s also a rather brief one as you can complete the game in around 2 hours. I can’t help but feel there might have been ways to extend the game’s replay – perhaps an arcade-style mode where you can retry cooking your favorite dishes or greater player choice to encourage multiple playthroughs. That said, I don’t necessarily think this story would have been any better if it was longer. That Venba can be played through in around the time it would take to cook many of its dishes feels appropriate in a way.

This review was based on a Switch copy of Venba provided by publisher Visai Games.   

Venba

Venba is a delectable slice of a game that offers a subtly moving story that ought to appeal to Tamil people, first-generation immigrants and their children, and wider audiences alike. It’s also a fantastic cooking game, capturing the sights, sounds, joys, and challenges of preparing food like few games before it. A short runtime may leave you hungry for more, but that’s largely a testament to the quality of the meal.