Venba Review: Food Is Where the Heart Is

Named after the Tamil mother at the center of its story, Venba traces the role of food in the life of an Indian family after they immigrate to Canada. The game covers a quite long period of time in its characters’ lives, beginning with Venba learning that she’s pregnant with her son, Kavin, and continuing well past the boy’s graduation from college.

By necessity, then, the game can only offer brief glimpses of their lives, especially since the whole thing takes about an hour and a half to complete. In dialogue-driven scenes before each interactive cooking segment, we see how their lives have progressed and their relationships change, all of it depicted in beautiful cartoon designs with warm colors and squiggly edges.

As for the cuisine, it looks absolutely delicious in this style, and it’s plain to see not only the pleasure that Venba takes in its preparation, but its importance in staying connected to Tamil culture. The cooking scenes unfold in a screen-filling overhead view of the kitchen counter, so while we continue to play as Venba, the character models disappear entirely, as if to demonstrate how absorbing the cooking process is and how much attention it demands.

With all the necessary ingredients and cooking implements for a given dish at your disposal, you more or less follow instructions to finish preparing the dish. Among your tasks is adding ingredients in the right order and turning the heat on the oven to the proper setting. Considering that the game is so short, its variety is all the more impressive, with each segment requiring totally new techniques rather than building on ones used for prior dishes.

Beneath the game’s bright exterior, though, is no small amount of struggle. The preparation of food may express care and devotion, but gathering around the table for a meal doesn’t magically diffuse conflict. The dialogue scenes depict Venba and her husband Paavalan’s considerable difficulties with assimilation, as they’re passed over for better-paying jobs and struggle to fit into the ones they find. Kavin fares better, but to their dismay, he often seems determined to reject his heritage in order to better fit in among his friends. At one point, he remarks that he refuses to eat the lunch his mother packs him for school because he doesn’t want to stand out.

Venba’s story offers a resonant, refreshingly unvarnished look at immigrant struggles, though the cooking segments don’t always gel with the story. Venba’s recipe book is weathered, with its pages torn and handwriting smudged so that the order for adding certain ingredients or the actions for using certain appliances are obscured. Each dish is thus its own little puzzle, where players must not only follow the legible instructions but mentally fill in the blanks and figure out the correct actions to perform with the tools that are available to them.

But within the broader act of cooking, these puzzles often feel like arbitrary challenges, at once too slight to offer a sense of accomplishment yet just involved enough to derail the game while you perform trial and error in order to proceed. A hint button ensures that you’re never totally stuck, though its placement at the bottom of the screen in a translucent bubble makes using it feel like a concession of defeat, compounding any irritation rather than relieving it.

If the hindrances of the old recipe book are meant to put us in Venba’s shoes and get us to feel some broad approximation of her troubles, they fail to map coherently onto the progression of the story. By making players struggle with incomplete information right from the start, we never feel the sense of comfort and security with preparing this food that Venba would have until the middle of the game, where one segment breezily guides you through different actions to perform. Yet this is also the moment when narrative tensions rise to a fever pitch, further confusing any relationship between the story and the obstacles encountered while cooking.

Only toward the end does Venba hit upon a cohesive solution for both its story and its puzzles. The perspective shifts from Venba to Kavin, whose complicated relationship with his parents’ culture reframes the friction inherent to the game’s cooking segments: He has difficulty because he hasn’t prepared these dishes before and hasn’t cared to pay attention. Furthermore, his grasp on the Tamil language is rusty, so while he can refer to instructions at the top of the screen, they’ll be inaccurately translated and require the player to experiment while surmising their true meaning. This late change allows the game to finish strong, though the irritation of its earliest puzzles never quite dissipates, like a lingering taste from a dish whose flavors don’t fully cohere.

This game was reviewed with code provided by popagenda.