Food is much more than just food. It is an expression of love; for a culture, and for those who eat. Venba is not so much a cooking game, but a cooking game: a narrative puzzle about the restoration of an old cookbook that came into the hands of the titular character. Venba is a Tamil woman who left India for Canada with her husband to start anew; they are already thinking of leaving when she receives the news of her pregnancy. The first dish you make in the game, a savory rice cake called idli, becomes a way for Venba to break the news to her husband, a clever way to show how food can be part of any memory.
“Regardless of what’s happening on a particular day, the kitchen is always busy in South Asian homes,” says the lead designer, who goes by the name Abhi. “When children grow up and assimilate [into a new culture]they may forget their mother tongue, but they never forget the food that is cooked.”
Venba’s mother’s old cookbook is the key to every recipe you try to recreate. Some instructions are spotty or don’t make sense to someone unfamiliar with certain utensils or ingredients, so it’s up to you to figure it all out. It’s an approach that fits the story Visai Games wanted to tell better than following a step-by-step recipe, says Abhi. “Venba feels very guilty for moving away in the first place, and as her son quickly grows assimilated, she shrinks her roots.”
Venba’s food will introduce many players to Tamil culture, so the recipes need to be representative, but still accessible even to people who don’t know them. “At first we struggled to make a good puzzle out of these recipes,” says Abhi. “[South Asian] The recipes tend to be quite long and complicated, and while it was technically possible to make puzzles out of them, it didn’t make for a very fun game. After much research, I found that some recipes already had puzzles built in; we just had to discover them and contextualize them properly.” correctly, but the correct order of the steps is left for the players to figure out.
For Abhi, the key to a good food puzzle is finding a balance between accurately representing real recipes while making them easy enough to understand and fun to play for a wide audience. “Testing these puzzles is also very difficult, as people who have cooked these recipes before come in with knowledge that makes solving them trivial,” he says. “But if I design it to be difficult even for them, it will be much, much more difficult for players who have never cooked like this!”
As much fun as these recipes are to figure out, Abhi stresses that cooking is work, and the juggling act of raising a child and the immigrant experience is at the core of Venba’s narrative. “Cooking in the media is usually fun to watch, and at Venba we’ve also tried to capture and really convey how satisfying cooking can be with art, sound and visual effects. But sometimes cooking is a chore and we want the players to feel that too.”
Visai Studios aims for an enriching experience that chronicles the struggles of its characters and teaches players about Tamil culture. It’s a little sweet, a little sour, but full of flavor.