On the floor, Venba, a captivating cooking puzzle sport wherein you restore a household’s cookbook, is simply that. It’s a colourful, AMSR-esque cooking sport that’ll mild a hearth in your stomach to cease ordering takeout and get busy making dishes in your personal kitchen. Nonetheless, after rolling the credit on the narrative puzzle sport, I walked away with a thought that was even meatier than the culinary brain-teasing puzzles I’d spent the higher a part of three hours finishing. The trial and error of cooking in Venba taught me that one should forge their very own path to happiness, even when it means deviating from directions.
Venba, developed by Visai Studios and out now on Sport Go, tells the story of an Indian lady named Venba, her husband Paavalan, and their son Kavin. The couple immigrated from India to Toronto, Canada, within the ‘80s to ascertain a greater life for themselves. Whereas the foreground of the sport sees you making meals from Venba’s household historical past utilizing her mom’s worn-out cookbook as a information, the crux of Venba’s decade-spanning narrative facilities on how the diaspora of immigration forces the household to decide on between assimilation or preventing to protect their cultural identification.
On the onset of the sport, Venba and Paavalan, already in Canada, are struggling economically as a result of their purposes for jobs maintain getting rejected. Issues are made all of the extra difficult with the start of their son, Kavin, which forces the couple to cope with whether or not or not issues could be simpler in the event that they minimize their losses and moved again to India. Finally, nonetheless, the household decides to stay with dwelling in Canada, and Venba makes use of her mom’s cookbook, a hallowed relic of the life she left behind, as a way to remain in contact together with her proud heritage.
Nonetheless, from this determination emerges a brand new battle between Venba and Kavin, who would somewhat assimilate into North American tradition by accepting the Americanized nickname of Kevin and eating on meals like pizza as an alternative of South Asian dishes out of worry of being bullied for being completely different like his mother and father. This difficult battle manifests itself in Venba’s difficult cooking puzzles.
Nearly all of the sport’s cooking puzzles contain a sequence of trial-and-error culinary dilemmas the place you have to make meals utilizing Venba’s hand-me-down cookbook. It’s a activity made all of the harder due to the wear-and-tear harm the cookbook has suffered through the years.
A number of the recipes in Venba’s household cookbook have essential steps light away by water harm. To beat this, you have to lean on Venba’s childhood reminiscences of constructing dishes like idlis, dosas, and biryanis together with her mom. For those who’re caught on a puzzle, the sport has useful tricks to level you in the appropriate course for the way to do them with out fully holding your hand via them.
For instance, puttu (a dish that had each Kavin’s eyes and mine mild up when it was decribed as a rocket ship) requires that you just layer rice and coconut shavings on high of one another earlier than baking in a cylindrical cooker. Nonetheless, Venba’s cookbook by no means explicitly specifies which order you do that in, and solely offers you a ratio for the way to layer the dish earlier than cooking. However if you happen to do sufficient trial runs (or use the sport’s trace system), you’ll uncover that the coconut layers have to be a few rice layers aside so the puttu’s consistency doesn’t trigger it to topple over earlier than it ever reaches your plate.
For those who aren’t of South Asian descent, the dishes you cook dinner in Venba could also be stuff you’ve by no means heard of or had earlier than in your life, which, in my case, solely made me wish to give making dishes like puttu a whirl in my very own kitchen. Most of the tactile processes you carry out, like straining floor rice in a colander, frying herbs and diced onions in a frying pan, and slow-cooking a pot of mutton, amongst others, are sufficient to make you want you possibly can scent the tantalizing aromas Venba’s kitchen has on provide. And the sport’s vibrant artwork model conveys the pan-sizzling pops and the mouth-watering look of every dish, in addition to the communal pleasure of cooking as a household.
Whereas on the one hand, I discovered that the cultural distinction between myself and its characters gave Venba’s puzzles a further degree of issue, it additionally made fixing all of them the extra gratifying. I think that for a lot of, these cultural variations may even function an ingenious automobile to assist gamers perceive and empathize with the generational divide between Venba and Kavin.
Venba’s cookbook is principally her bible, in that it supplies directions meant to nourish her household whereas they sail the customarily unforgiving waves of being first-generation immigrants in Canada. For Venba, following these directions not solely serves as a manner to offer for her household as they face discrimination, nevertheless it additionally retains her near the household she left behind in India.
Whereas Venba fights tooth and nail to protect her cultural heritage by restoring her mom’s cookbook recipes and, in so doing, bringing somewhat little bit of India with them to Canada, Kavin is wrestling with how his roots make it tougher for him to assimilate at school. Though Venba’s insistence that Kavin communicate Tamil and eat South Asian delicacies comes from a spot of affection, Kavin sees it as ammo that bullies can use to harass him.
Nonetheless, all through the course of the sport, Venba discovers that, just like the light pages of her cookbook, there aren’t any set directions for parenting. On the finish of the day, procedural directions on the way to do issues like cook dinner a meal or anecdotal recommendation on the way to navigate a cultural divide will solely get you up to now. Eventually, you must work out the way to finest present for your self, even when which means letting your son uncover his personal recipe for navigating life.
This theme involves a head fairly superbly towards the finale of the sport when Kavin should use his mom’s cookbook to recreate one in all her meals. It’s there that he discovers a large number of addendums to recipes made by each his late grandmother and his mom, who desires the ebook’s knowledge to be accessible to him even when the language isn’t. These additions embody issues like Venba’s mom recommending using towels when making idlis, in addition to drawings made by Venba to assist Kavin alongside ought to he want to recreate their meals however have issue translating Tamil. Taken collectively, they kind a legacy of familial love and care, a paying ahead of beneficial information gleaned whereas studying, failing, and succeeding in making the meals themselves through the years. These thoughtful private additions are each healthful, and pivotal in your cooking towards the latter half of the sport. However on the finish of the day, it’s as much as Kavin to determine, via his personal trial and error, whether or not their recommendation meets his personal explicit tastes or if he ought to remix their dishes to suit his liking.
Venba is a type of deceptively resonant video games I’d placed on par with titles like Dot’s House and Validate in the way it takes seemingly dense ideas just like the cultural divide of immigration and dices it up into bite-sized chunks which are digestible for gamers no matter whether or not or not they share the identical cultural background as its characters.
Though Venba’s gameplay boils right down to observe making excellent, its cooking puzzles and narrative additionally work collectively to completely illustrate the trials Venba’s household is dealing with. By pulling you into this course of, it builds a bridge of empathy for gamers like myself, serving to us relate to the loss that comes with rising aside from one’s household and the love that retains you tethered to them whilst you forge your personal path. Pairing that each one too relatable human expertise with the making of a bounty of scrumptious meals I’d wish to attempt my hand at IRL is simply the icing on the puttu.
Venba is out now for Xbox One, Xbox Collection X/S, PlayStation 5, the Nintendo Swap, and PC.