Venba (Xbox Series X)
Food is a rather special part of a culture, because while there are many traditions you can choose whether or not to embrace, everyone needs to eat and what you eat will be influenced by where you live and those who raise you. A vision of home and family is built in the back of your mind that can be activated by a smell or a taste and it’s not that rare to hear someone’s favorite food is something prepared by a specific loved one. Venba is a short story that chooses to emphasize that special role food can play, the characters having conversations about their cultural identities but finding sometimes the food that unites them speaks in a special way that’s harder to ignore.
Venba is the name of the woman at the center of this cooking puzzle game, the player joining her life story after her and her husband Paavalan move from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu to Canada. Believing Canada will provide better opportunities for them in quite a few ways, they struggle as they try to integrate into the new culture, especially after their son Kavin is born and he seems to prefer Canada over their traditions and culture. The game is actually rather selective in what it shows and what is said directly, the player rarely getting a view outside of the homes of the main character and the plot will take large jumps forward in time. There can be some surprisingly subtle moments as you’re left to interpret what you see or what has happened since last you checked in. You’re getting small slices in time to understand these characters and these moments are some of the most emotional ones as the family finds their efforts to try and live a prosperous life can often come with challenges to their cultural identity.
The strongest focus is given on Venba’s own relationship to her mother and Kavin, Venba trying to carry on the traditions of her family almost alone as Kavin’s friends and schooling influence him in a new direction. On one hand you have the almost universal struggle for one generation to try and connect with the next one as interests drift apart, but you also have the more intimate immigrant tale of someone leaving their country and doing their best in an unfamiliar culture. The successes and setbacks as Venba tries to reach out lead to shifts from heartwarming to heartbreaking moments, and Venba’s husband Paavalan proves a useful part of the tale as he can lead to more direct discussion of the concerns associated with clashing cultures so not everything is left up to the player to interpret. Seeing characters at different points in life also flesh things out as the opportunities to bridge a growing divide diminish. Kavin becomes more independent with age, so Venba tries to find ways to still reach out as her own age lessens what she can even do. Memories of the family back in Tamil Nadu pull her towards her past, but Venba wants to connect with the future of her son too, and that ends up being how this complicated personal and cultural conundrum ends up connecting to the cooking.
When Venba begins and you find the family just settling into their home in Canada, Venba’s cooking is a way of preserving herself and the loved ones she’s moved away from. Her mother’s recipe book comes with meals familiar to her and ones that inspire specific memories, but as the story progresses and she raises her son, those traditional recipes become a way to try and reach out to Kavin and pull him in closer to the world Venba knows. Cooking becomes an indirect message, an expression of love, an invite, a chance at reconnecting with things the characters thought they forgot. It unlocks memories and feelings or inspires new ones but it does so subtly, sneaking in to leave its mark and build up something meaningful. The game rather cleverly uses the cooking process as a chance for characters to reflect or reach out, the puzzles themselves even tying into the overall theme of cultural connections being strained by the distance between loved ones.
Venba’s cookbook from her mother is unfortunately a rather worn old thing, meaning that when Venba wants to create a meal she has a strong attachment to, she can’t just rely on what’s written in the book. At first, the player will mostly be trying to fill in gaps left by torn pages and smudged ink. Diagrams and written steps don’t ask for existing knowledge of cooking really, the elements you can easily read often pushing you towards the right inferences as you notice the connecting steps missing between certain instructions. The book isn’t the only thing you’ll rely on to piece together incomplete recipes though, characters eventually starting to recall specific moments and conversations that serve as hints on how to do things. Again, you’re given the right amount of important information to solve things by pondering what you know is important but weren’t given explicit instructions on, most of the puzzles requiring some thinking but they’re deliberately not too complex.
Venba includes a recipe section separate from the main game that tells you how to produce many of the dishes you’ll cook in game and even it has to admit that it simplifies many of the dishes since this otherwise 1-2 hour game could have found itself slowed down by more intricate cooking segments. The actual acts of adding food, mixing, and heating things aren’t made difficult as the puzzles are usually about figuring out the proper sequence for actions most of the time, and even if you mess up you can easily undo some actions or retry the full process without missing out on anything. You can overcook and make other small mistakes like failing to place things in the right spots, but Venba seems to be more about the enjoyment of figuring out a gap in information rather than demanding cooking perfection or difficult problem solving.
The food in Venba is quite varied so the different dishes can feature new steps and new ways to test your ability to fill in the gaps in recipes. The puttu requires a sieve, a blender, and properly figuring out how to layer the ingredients, but chicken rasam has a huge spread of ingredients for the cooking pot where you need to determine their proper order despite there being unusual errors when the instructions are read. The game’s art style really gives special attention to making the food look unique and delectable, the simplified characters charming but the dishes can look close to life despite being part of this colorful illustrated style. Excellent Tamil music plays to back your time spent in the kitchen, the kind that gives a bit of pep to the proceedings without distracting from the task at hand. Because of the game’s length you might think you won’t make too many unique meals, but Venba also knows how to make certain steps speedy or even feature moments where making the meal isn’t a challenge so much as something you feel your way through since they’re part of creating a moment rather than serving as one of the tests of your ability to fill in missing information.
THE VERDICT: Venba is an emotional tale with the clever touch of having figuring out the missing information in cooking puzzles tie into the different connections people have to their culture and each other. While quite short, Venba’s tale is composed of quick meaningful cross-sections of a family’s life through the years that get across the themes well while still spending the time needed to build up characters you come to care for. The cooking ties into those emotional highs and lows as well, each dish having an importance greater than its already effective role of being an interesting test of picking up on well placed clues.
And so, I give Venba for Xbox Series X…
A GOOD rating. A lovely story about the struggles of immigrant life with an intimate focus so close to the characters you see little outside the moments where food brings them together, Venba is definitely a nice way to spend a bit of time with a puzzle game that isn’t too demanding and a narrative that’s easy to empathize with. The south Indian touches give the game it’s own cultural identity but the themes of drifting apart from distant relatives and feeling the gap between cultures and generations are part of the human experience for all. Venba is not afraid to come out and say her worries and struggles at parts so it’s not shying away from specificity but at other moment the deeper meanings behind actions are hinted at well without it being directly addressed. Some moments have that sort of brutal realism that we can’t deny would be part of someone’s life even if the softer moments make it hard to accept something happened to this family doing their best. Cooking being part of the tale is used in interesting ways as well as you know the work you put into a dish or how much it means when others might simply see it as what’s on the plate, this growing understanding that food is a piece of how we can connect with others the main focus as we see how it influences the story’s path. Venba’s story can jump ahead in large leaps but those feel purposeful while it can feel like more room to figure out cooking puzzles could have made that element shine a bit more. Similarly, while this broad perspective of Venba’s life is smart in selecting its moments, steeping us deeper in this cultural heritage or spending more time with the characters could have allowed the moments of sadness and cheer to be even more effective even if that came with a sacrifice of some of the subtlety it pulls off rather well.
Venba can be touching despite its brevity and it has a good sense for where to put its attention so the story effectively comes across. The moments where food matters being your connection to its world will make you ache for a deeper picture of this family’s life and their struggles, but the process of solving the cooking puzzles is important to the structure too. In fact, you’ll be wanting more from the story and the cooking since both are done well but leave you hungry for more, Venba certainly a robust dish even if you find yourself wishing for bigger portions because this flavorful tale resonates so beautifully.