Venba

“We did everything we wanted to with Venba,” Visai Games designer Abhi told Polygon. “Even if the team was given an additional budget to make more Venba content, I’m not sure if we would necessarily want to make more levels as we are really happy with the story we have told.”

We have seen the sun! And it was good! It’s going away now though so you can all retreat into the safety of your gaming rooms again. We’ve also been looking at our Gamescom appointments for a couple of week’s time, and things are looking very exciting! You can be sure that we’ll have a ton of coverage from the conference, so that’s something to look forward to as well.

Food is a core part of human civilisation. At a base level, it provides sustenance and energy for us to keep going, but it’s so much more than that. In all cultures around the world, food plays a crucial role in creating bonds and experiences, links back to our pasts, as well as providing a link to neighbouring cultures. Within South Asian cultures, food is part of the heart of relationships as mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, and friends all cook together while strengthening personal relationships. Venba explores one such relationship with a mother, father, and son from a Tamil background with themes and situations that would be familiar to all children of immigrants, especially those from South Asian backgrounds.

Food is a core part of human civilisation. At a base level, it provides sustenance and energy for us to keep going, but it’s so much more than that. In all cultures around the world, food plays a crucial role in creating bonds and experiences, links back to our pasts, as well as providing a link to neighbouring cultures. Within South Asian cultures, food is part of the heart of relationships as mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, and friends all cook together while strengthening personal relationships. Venba explores one such relationship with a mother, father, and son from a Tamil background with themes and situations that would be familiar to all children of immigrants, especially those from South Asian backgrounds.

A lot of cooking games are designed to be stressful: By getting you to cook while jumping in between portals or making you deal with hangry hordes, they change a normally peaceful daily activity into something harried and intense. Not so with Venba, a cooking puzzle game slash visual novel that released on Steam this week. It's about an Indian family that moves to Canada, and instead of lines of screaming customers, you'll prepare meals for your family by solving puzzles and unlocking the memories of a woman trying to make a new home.

Cook delicious South-Indian food and experience the journey of an immigrant family in Venba! Venba is a narrative cooking game where you play as an Indian mom who immigrates to Canada with her family in the 1980s. Players will cook various dishes and restore lost recipes, hold branchingCook delicious South-Indian food and experience the journey of an immigrant family in Venba! Venba is a narrative cooking game where you play as an Indian mom who immigrates to Canada with her family in the 1980s.

Venba does not just make me feel seen, Venba makes me feel acknowledged and reassured in ways video games have never explored so profoundly.

Cook delicious South-Indian food and experience the journey of an immigrant family in Venba! Venba is a narrative cooking game where you play as an Indian mom who immigrates to Canada with her family in the 1980s. Players will cook various dishes and restore lost recipes, hold branchingCook delicious South-Indian food and experience the journey of an immigrant family in Venba! Venba is a narrative cooking game where you play as an Indian mom who immigrates to Canada with her family in the 1980s.

Cook delicious South-Indian food and experience the journey of an immigrant family in Venba! Venba is a narrative cooking game where you play as an Indian mom who immigrates to Canada with her family in the 1980s. Players will cook various dishes and restore lost recipes, hold branchingCook delicious South-Indian food and experience the journey of an immigrant family in Venba! Venba is a narrative cooking game where you play as an Indian mom who immigrates to Canada with her family in the 1980s.

Something I’ve come to appreciate more than ever is entertainment’s ability to introduce us to cultures other than our own. It probably has something to do with the fact that I live in a small, redneck part of California where white people loudly complain about the number of Mexican restaurants in town. Listening to that crap day in and day out, it’s no wonder I’m always jumping at the chance to discover something beyond my powder-white existence.

Venba is not a cooking game in the way you might expect. Food is, of course, important in games such as Cooking Mama or Overcooked, but in Venba, food is the game. Over the course of developer Visai Games’ upcoming release, which took me just over an hour to play, the studio deploys cooking mechanics as a way to explore the culture and unlock the memories of the titular Venba, an immigrant mother struggling to connect with her young son.

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