Venba

Reviewed by: Anastasia Hutnick

Review date: April 2, 2025

Site Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1491670/Venba/

Archive Link: https://archive.ph/JmxKG

Keywords: Asian Studies, Biography and Prosopography, Cultural Heritage, Electronic Literature, Ethnographic Analysis, Game Studies, Preservation, South Asian Studies

Data Sources:

• The developer’s biographical experience of moving to Canada from India at age 12
  
• South Indian recipes (i.e. dosas, idlis, biryani, etc)
  
• Songs inspired by Tamil music

Processes:

• Gamification of reading, remembering, and following a recipe
  
• Dialogue trees to move along the narrative
  
• Publishing step by step recipes to be found on the main menu
  
• Publishing music in the game’s soundtrack as well as in a playlist on the main menu

Presentation:

This project is a visual novel with interactive dialogue and cooking puzzles developed in Unity. It tells the story of a South Indian woman named Venba who immigrated to Canada with her husband in the 1980s. She brought over a book of recipes that she had learned from her mother, though the book was damaged in the move. As she prepares the recipes over the years, she must call upon her memories to successfully complete the dish. As the years go on, she has a son who grows up and apart from his parents and his family’s culture. Through the intervention of the recipe book, Venba and her son come back to each other and see each other eye to eye.

Digital Tools Used:

• Unity

Languages:

• English
  
• Tamil
  
  • Note: The game has an extensive use of Tamil, including romanticisation of terms in dialogue and written Tamil in books and inspirational quotes found throughout the game.

Review

Venba was released on July 31, 2023, by Visai Games. Lead developer Abhi had been developing the game with his team, including Indonesian artist Sam Elkana, since 2020. Abhi was inspired by his own experience immigrating to Canada from India and wanted to reflect on the relationships between first-generation immigrant parents and their children and the characters’ connection and reconnection with their culture. The main character, Venba, deals with her and her husband making ends meet and finding suitable employment after immigrating to Canada, homesickness, raising a child who is culturally distant, microaggressions, racial violence, aging, and more with cooking recipes from her mother’s book. This game was created with support by Ontario Creates.

The gameplay consists of cooking and dialogue selection. In each “level,” the player will assist Venba (and later her son Kavin) in preparing South Indian dishes (including idlis, puttu, biryani, chicken rasam, and dosas) with each recipe being prepared at a different moment in Venba and her family’s life. The cooking gameplay mainly consists of consulting Venba’s mother’s damaged cookbook and figuring out what it originally said. When making idlis, the player must deduce that they must place a towel on the tray before ladling in the batter. When making puttu, the player must figure out in what order to layer the ingredients. The player may also request a hint or ask for more information about the food that they are preparing in a diegetic manner. In so doing, the player is more engaged in the act of memory and connection along with Venba.

The dialogue and cutscenes provide context to Venba and her family’s immigrant experience. For example, when Kavin is first introduced, his speech reveals itself at a slower pace with the text behind spots of dirt. At first, this aesthetic choice may seem like a product of a child’s playfulness and messiness. However, the narrative naturally reveals that this text style only occurs when Kavin speaks English, as his parents both speak Tamil in the house and at times struggle with English. Similarly, despite Venba’s insistence on speaking it, Kavin also struggles with Tamil as he grows up. Abhi wanted to reflect the characters’ vibrancy that was so often lost in the language barrier, choosing this style to let each aspect of their intersectional identity shine through uninhibited by that language barrier.

Occasionally, the player is provided with two dialogue options. Ultimately, these dialogue paths do not impact the overall story, but rather provide the player with different pieces of information or the same information expressed differently, encouraging replayability. Similar to Night in the Woods, the player does not ultimately change the identity of the character speaking regardless of which dialogue option they choose. For the first dialogue choice, Venba may respond to Pavalaan that she feels tired or nauseous, but she responds by saying that she doesn’t feel well either way. Kavin, when asking about his parents’ history, may ask about different aspects of their lives, but the tone of the conversation and its narrative purpose stays the same. The player is watching the story unfold rather than inserting themself as an active agent into it.

This project differs from my other reviews in that the project itself is a video game and the memory preservation happens through narrative. Instead of the project directly preserving primary sources such as oral history interviews or pieces of writing, the preserved memories are much more intricately woven. While the player can find recipes for each of the meals prepared in the main menu, the main gameplay focuses more on the act of food preparation and what it means to the characters. The memories preserved are feelings rather than concrete works or events of their own.

For once, I don’t have to lament the lack of attention that a deserving project has received. Venba has won several awards, including Best Debut at BAFTA and the Game Developers’ Choice Awards , the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival, and the Social Impact Award at the Game Developers’ Choice Awards. It has been reviewed by popular gaming journalism sites such as Polygon, Metacritic, and Rock Paper Shotgun and has been featured by Wholesome Games as well as by various gaming YouTubers. This game has also been reviewed over 1,600 times on Steam, with 93% of the reviews being positive. Considering that this game was the first created by independent studio Visai Games, Venba has made quite the entrance for the company.

How are the collaborative aspects reflected in the project and are there elements that work particularly well?

The lead developer Abhi mentioned that he had collaborated with an Indian chef to ensure that the recipes in the game were authentic. Venba received support from Ontario Creates, a provincial government agency that funds and supports Ontario’s entertainment and creative industries. Wholesome Games, a gaming community and publisher, featured Venba in their Wholesome Direct - Indie Games Showcase 2023. The game has been ported to various platforms other than Steam, including the Nintendo Switch, Playstation, and Xbox. It has also been covered by several YouTubers, perhaps most notable of which being Gab Smolders, whose video achieved 243,000 views.

Do you see an opportunity for collaboration that would be helpful to the project?

I believe that this game could feature in lesson plans or video game “book” clubs featuring South Asian culture, modern South Asian history, immigration stories, food stories, family, or visual novels. Venba could also serve as inspiration for other games covering aspects of day-to-day diasporic culture for immigrant communities to share with the next generation and the wider public.