Venba review: expanding the boundaries of the cooking genre

Venba shouldn’t be a cooking recreation in the way in which you would possibly anticipate. Meals is, after all, essential in video games similar to Cooking Mama or Overcooked, however in Venba, meals is the sport. Over the course of developer Visai Video games’ upcoming launch, which took me simply over an hour to play, the studio deploys cooking mechanics as a option to discover the tradition and unlock the reminiscences of the titular Venba, an immigrant mom struggling to attach along with her younger son.

The sport begins shortly after Venba and her husband go away Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state, for a brand new life in Canada. Meals, for Venba, is an act of care and a connection to her previous; meals is the way in which she reveals her love, whether or not that’s making lunch for her husband every morning or or making a celebratory environment round every nightly dinner. Every brief chapter is a vignette encapsulating a yr in Venba’s life. These chapters — generally heartwarming, generally painful — progress from the early days of the household’s transfer to Canada, instructing moments with their younger son, and battle and heartbreak because the trio grows older.

Every chapter combines the visible novel segments with easy cooking puzzles. As Venba, you cook dinner the recipes pulled from an previous household cookbook that’s clearly well-loved — it’s battered and torn, splashed with oils and sauces. That is the place the puzzles are available in; the recipes are incomplete due to blurred phrases right here and a web page rip there. Venba pulls from her reminiscences to fill in these gaps, which, mixed with the cookbook, offers you the instruments you might want to make the dish. Every recipe is superbly rendered in Venba’s stylized, colourful artwork model, all the things from a fancy biryani to a towering puttu.

Picture: Visai Video games

The recipes slowly construct in complexity, however none are too difficult to unravel. As a result of in Venba, that’s not likely the purpose. The sport shouldn’t be testing your dexterity or controller expertise. As an alternative, it’s utilizing the bodily act of cooking — the delicateness required to pinch spices into scorching oil or dexterity to flip components earlier than they burn — to offer additional depth to its story.

What Venba provides as much as is a brief, touching story concerning the lifetime of an Indian Canadian household — the wonder and pleasure of Tamil tradition alongside the battle of immigrant dad and mom and their child. It’s a fancy relationship depicted between dad and mom and a child as their son pushes away from Tamil tradition in change for becoming in. The meals and recipes evolve alongside this altering relationship and assist transfer the sport alongside in a method that feels centered and pure.

Picture: Visai Video games

That form of pacing is a large feat for a recreation like Venba, which packs many years of Venba’s story into simply over an hour. It will have been simple for the story to really feel partial or rushed, however the cooking segments actually assist in slowing down even essentially the most intense moments, letting me linger and really feel earlier than shifting on. Venba by no means as soon as loses sight of its emotional core, and it’s paced expertly all through its brief however highly effective run time.

I might have liked extra Venba, with its vibrant sound, touching story, and mouthwatering meals, and but, I nonetheless really feel like Visai Video games has instructed a whole, centered story.

Venba shall be launched on July 31 on Nintendo Change, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Home windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Sequence X. The sport was reviewed on Steam Deck utilizing a pre-release obtain code supplied by Visai Video games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These don’t affect editorial content material, although Vox Media might earn commissions for merchandise bought by way of affiliate hyperlinks. You’ll find extra details about Polygon’s ethics coverage right here.