This game makes me feel very seen.

August 2, 2023 6:29 AM

Tourist To Your Own Culture By Veerender Singh Jubbal [Gamespot] “Venba is a game that has been on my radar since its announcement trailer was released in 2020. It comes from a mainly South Asian development team, with its aesthetics, character designs, and sound design drawing its inspiration from the culture to tell a story about a South Asian family trying to reclaim and archive their own underrepresented culture after immigrating to Canada. It is an incredibly ambitious title to pursue when many video games do not try to engage with having cultures or identities outside of the white/western represented. Venba is about trying to figure out your own identity (or sometimes lack thereof) in an all-new environment. This new environment is not kind or accommodating to people who are not considered white, and if you are underrepresented from a culture of color you are swayed and forced to assimilate, leaving what made you unique behind to survive this new place.” [Game Trailer][YouTube]

• Venba expands the boundaries of the cooking game genre By Nicole Carpenter [Polygon]

“The game begins shortly after Venba and her husband leave Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state, for a new life in Canada. Food, for Venba, is an act of care and a connection to her past; food is the way she shows her love, whether that’s making lunch for her husband every morning or creating a celebratory atmosphere around each nightly dinner. Each short chapter is a vignette encapsulating a year in Venba’s life. These chapters — sometimes heartwarming, sometimes painful — progress through the early days of the family’s move to Canada, teaching moments with their young son, and conflict and heartbreak as the trio grows older. Each chapter combines visual novel segments with simple cooking puzzles. As Venba, you make recipes pulled from an old family cookbook that’s obviously well loved — it’s battered and torn, splashed with oils and sauces. This is where the puzzles come in; the recipes are incomplete because of blurred words here and a page rip there. Venba pulls from her memories to fill in these gaps, which, combined with the cookbook, gives you the tools you need to make the dish. Each recipe is beautifully rendered in Venba’s stylized, colorful art style, everything from a complex biryani to a towering puttu.”

• Don’t Miss This Moving, Mouthwatering Cooking Game Now On Game Pass by Isaiah Colbert [Kotaku]

“If you aren’t of South Asian descent, the dishes you cook in Venba may be things you’ve never heard of or had before in your life, which, in my case, only made me want to give making dishes like puttu a whirl in my own kitchen. Many of the tactile processes you perform, like straining ground rice in a colander, frying herbs and diced onions in a frying pan, and slow-cooking a pot of mutton, among others, are enough to make you wish you could smell the tantalizing aromas Venba’s kitchen has on offer. And the game’s vibrant art style conveys the pan-sizzling pops and the mouth-watering look of each dish, as well as the communal joy of cooking as a family. While on the one hand, I found that the cultural difference between myself and its characters gave Venba’s puzzles an additional level of difficulty, it also made solving them all the more gratifying. I suspect that for many, those cultural differences will also serve as an ingenious vehicle to help players understand and empathize with the generational divide between Venba and Kavin.”

posted by Fizz (5 comments total)

My wife and I played through the first 20 minutes of the game (two of the cooking challenges + narrative sections) and its such a beautiful game and written with such a sense of heart and emotion. It captures small moments that made me feel like I was being seen in a way that doesn't happen too often in the mainstream. Venba's interactions with her husband and son are filled with all kinds of layers of meaning and complexity, especially regarding the immigrant experience and what its like to be in a very different place and all the challenges that come with two cultures colliding. I urge everyone to find a way to play the game. It doesn't seem to be very long but I already know that this game will stay with me for a long time.
posted by Fizz at 6:46 AM on August 2, 2023 [5 favorites]

I haven’t played it yet, but I listened to a good interview with the developer on Eggplant.
posted by ignignokt at 7:32 AM on August 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've actually been really looking forward to this one since I heard an early announcement about it. Happily it is on Xbox's game pass so I plan to dive in soon!
posted by Ashwagandha at 12:47 PM on August 2, 2023

Hey, it's Veerender! I've been really enjoying his writing, following his work from back when "#StopGamerGate2014" was the framing, before it became the multi-year ongoing snarl that that was.
I'm looking forward to picking this game up at some point, I love reading about games from perspectives that really engage with what something's trying to do & when it falls short. (See also, Dia Lacina's writing. Banished Vault most recently, but that game could do with a post of its own)
posted by CrystalDave at 4:09 PM on August 2, 2023

I played it. It was terrific! Not a lot of game in the game, but sometimes that's nice. It's short (2 hours, maybe?), beautiful (music and graphics), and made me very, very hungry.
posted by joelhunt at 5:37 PM on August 2, 2023