Venba is the newest cooking game coming to PC, PlayStation, Switch, and Xbox on July 31. Addressing poignant themes such as culture, family, love, and loss, this new indie title is not the usual cooking game one might have come to expect. Visai Studios’ newest game sheds the typical race-against-the-clock style design in favor of an experience that focuses heavily on a narrative that explores how food and culture help tie an immigrant family together.
Game ZXC speaks with designer and writer Abhi about how Venba fits into the cooking game genre and its important message about how, even when words fail, food can be an expression of love that binds families together. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
GR: Please start off by introducing yourself. Who are you, and what do you do?
Abhi: I’m Abhi, the designer and writer behind Venba!
GR: Please tell me the background of Venba. Where did the idea for the project come from?
Abhi: The idea for Venba was strongly inspired by the South Asian communities I’ve grown up with. Specifically, the relationship between first-generation parents and their assimilated children who have real barriers in language and culture. We wanted to make a game that explored these relationships and the challenges they typically face.
GR: Did you always know you wanted to make a game that centers around food and family? How did the project change over time from its original idea?
Abhi: Yes, which is pretty surprising to me given how games typically change so much through development. However, Venba, from the beginning, was a game about cooking, culture, and family.
GR: It's impressive Venba's concept stayed the same throughout the development cycle! Were there any features of the game that changed over time? Or maybe ideas/mechanics that were cut during development?
Abhi: Yes! The core concept remained the same but how we executed it changed a lot. The first iteration was meant to be small vignettes with no dialogue, which is in sharp contrast to how the final game plays. We also approach the cooking almost like a cooking simulator in the beginning and finally settled on a much simpler approach to our cooking gameplay with our almost toy-like approach.
GR: Why choose cuisine as the centerpiece of Venba? How does food play a part in exploring some of these themes such as family, love, loss, etc.?
Abhi: Food is an incredibly important thing in our families, and cooking can be a language of love too! In immigrant families, if the mother and son are literally speaking different languages, food can become the only language that’s left between them. To measure or show if something is changing, you need something constant to measure it with. Food fills that role here and using that as a lens to tell this story and show how these characters change in not only their relationships to food but also their relationships to each other felt very fitting for me.
GR: What is your personal relationship with food, specifically South Indian cuisine, and how does it find its way into Venba?
Abhi: I’m very, very passionate about food in general, and I also love to cook a lot. I’ll even watch bad movies if it has good cooking scenes in it. I’m also very fond of South Indian cuisine and I think that helped in recreating the recipes authentically but also helped in capturing certain key moments when you make a recipe that we would all be excited about. Like water splashing on a hot dosa pan or the way biriyani looks when it’s cooked just right.
GR: What is your favorite cooking sequence in a film and why?
Abhi: It would have to be the scene in a Tamil film called Kaaka Muttai where the grandma recreates a pizza for her grandkids by making a Dosa instead. I have already tweeted the scene above some time ago!
GR: How does South Indian cuisine distinguish itself from that of other regions? How does that potentially play into the identities of the characters?
Abhi: South Indian cuisine is its own separate cuisine with a deep and rich history. This in general is true across India and its many different states. Even within Tamil Nadu, a state which is where Venba is from, there are so many distinct varieties and specialties depending on the region. Venba is very proud of this cuisine (as am I) and she wants to share that with her son, Kavin.
GR; How many dishes are featured in the game? What influenced your choice to include those dishes specifically?
Abhi: There are about 10 dishes in Venba. The dishes have been selected to reflect a variety of different things. First and foremost, the dish and the gameplay mechanics it introduces should make sense in that level’s story. Secondly, we also considered if it makes sense to make this particular dish at the time period the level was in. Since Venba starts in the 1980s and goes all the way to the late 2010s, the ingredients the players would have had access to would grow dramatically, paralleling the growth of immigrant communities there. Keeping this in mind, we tried to show more complex dishes that required special spices later than earlier.
GR: Please tell me more about the recipe restoration mechanic. How does it work, and how does it play into the overall story?
Abhi: We wanted to approach the cooking in a different way than how most cooking games have done it so far. Given that the themes of the game deals with culture and the importance of holding on to it, a damaged recipe book that players can only partially read from made a lot of sense to me!
GR: It looks like Venba focuses on a family of three. Can you tell me more about the characters and how they’re situated in the narrative?
Abhi: Yes! The main characters are Venba, her husband Paavalan, and their son Kavin. Venba and Paavalan move in the 1980s, and Kavin is born a few years later. The core of their differences is that Venba very much views Canada as a temporary home and wants her son Kavin to take a bigger part in the culture she grew up in. Kavin, however, is very comfortable being Canadian and feels a lot of pressure to assimilate from the outside, while also being pressured to retain his roots inside his home.
GR: Venba is releasing day one on Game Pass. What do you hope it brings to the catalog for subscribers?
Abhi: We hope people who are curious about Venba, but it’s not a genre they typically play a lot, get a chance to try it!
GR: How has it been working with Microsoft to get your game out on Game Pass? How has it helped?
Abhi: Working with Microsoft has been terrific. Indie development is very risky, but having the game on Game Pass helped us subsidize the risk quite a bit and, in turn, allowed us to invest a lot more into the game.
GR: How has your community’s response been to what you’ve released so far? What have people been particularly drawn to?
Abhi: The response has been very positive, and I’m very grateful and overwhelmed by it! I think even from the short demo we released, people are already very, very invested in these characters and their story, they can’t wait to see more!
Q: How do you feel that food can be used to track changes in our relationships over time? What kind of changes do you think we might see?
Abhi: It almost feels weird to think that we'll have strained relationships with delicious food. But what food means to these characters changes across the levels. For Kavin, it might go from something he's always had anxiety around to something he starts to develop a real connection with. For Venba, its importance definitely increases when it's one of the few remaining ways to connect with her son.
Q: Are there any other cooking games out there you feel do a good job of tying food and culture together? What are some other cooking games you enjoy playing?
Abhi: Yes, definitely. I really enjoyed Hot Pot for one as well as A Taste of the Past.
GR: This is more of a just-for-fun question to close us out. If you had to choose a South Indian dish to describe yourself, what would it be and why?
Abhi: Idli! They’re simple and what you see is what you get!
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Venba will be available July 31 for PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.