It's easy to shrug off the challenges that other people face. As a white male who was born and still lives in the United Kingdom, I've never been the subject of racism and haven't had to experience being an immigrant who gave up everything for the shot at a better life. I see stories exploring these areas being told frequently on the news, but it's always a challenge to directly relate to them without experiencing it for myself. Visai Games is looking to address exactly this with its new narrative cooking game, Venba.
This beautifully animated indie title is all about an Indian family, predominantly the mother, who is conveniently named, Venba. This family left India in the 1990s in favour of starting anew in Canada, and the story looks to explore the hardships they face and the wonderful surprises along the way, all while rooting the game together with two main gameplay elements; branching dialogue and cooking sections.
The story is only a short one, and you can complete the entire tale in at most two hours. You'll start as a young Venba as she and her husband tackle financial insecurity and the difficulties of being a foreign-educated immigrant looking to enter the workforce in a first-world country. After a short while, there's a time jump and the family has expanded with a young son, who is attempting to find where he fits into the world as both a boy of Tamil-descent and Canadian citizenship. After plenty more hardships and a very emotional scene, time jumps forward again until this young boy is getting ready to leave for university, and is ultimately pushing his family away in the hunt for more personal freedom. These time jumps keep occurring until the story caps off with an old Venba who has found peace after a very challenging and demanding life.
The tale is charming yet sad, emotional yet rewarding. It's a story that feels real and honest and even though there's unfortunately no spoken dialogue and only written text, you get a clear sense of who these characters are, what drives them, and their personalities. Although, it is worth saying that a lot of the personality of this title doesn't come from the narrative and dialogue but rather the cooking sections that weave minor puzzling systems together with memories.
These parts of Venba ask you to cook and create an array of Tamil dishes. Think Cooking Mama, except instead of just playing the game to set a high score or to get the best possible rating, you have to make these dishes to mark an occasion in Venba's life. Be it discovering she is pregnant, to prepare for her son leaving for university, Venba has a meal ripe for everything and she cooks them with the aid of a tattered cookbook that has been passed down from generation-to-generation within her family. The catch however, is that the cookbook is rather worse for wear, and parts of each recipe are blotted out or missing, and you have to tap into Venba's memories or just problem solve or your own intuition to create the meal exactly as it's supposed to be prepared. I won't comment on the authenticity of the recipes as I'm not a Tamil chef, but I will say that the art style works wonders for making each meal look truly delicious.
I do think that the game could benefit from having more complex recipe puzzles, as some of the solutions are so straightforward that they barely challenge whatsoever. I can understand that the aim of the game is to be accessible, but you can maintain the very simplistic gameplay mechanics and yet offer more challenging puzzles to keep players on their toes mentally.
But regardless of this, for a very short indie title that is easy to pick up and play, Venba is an interesting, thought-provoking, and emotional tale that is worth checking out. The cooking gameplay and the engaging narrative, matched up with the eye-catching and colourful South Indian cuisine-inspired colour palette make for an experience that is well worth the 1-2 hours it will take to complete it.
