Highlights
- Venba stands out from other cooking games by focusing heavily on storytelling and the cultural implications of food, making it a unique and heartfelt gaming experience.
- Unlike traditional cooking games, Venba shifts the gameplay focus away from timed challenges to a narrative-centered experience that explores the importance of holding onto culture through food.
- The central cooking mechanic of Venba revolves around restoring old, damaged recipes, allowing players to cook South Indian cuisine and capture the essence of key moments in the cooking process, creating a truly immersive and authentic culinary experience.
Venba is a new narrative cooking game focusing on the family dynamics of an immigrant family in Canada, following multiple years of their lives as they face hardships, grow, change. Unlike other popular cooking games, this new indie title from Visai Studios focuses heavily on storytelling and the implications of food and how it becomes the crux of culture, family, love, loss, and more. Venba will be available on Game Pass, PC, PlayStation, and Switch July 31.
Game ZXC spoke with writer and designer Abhi to learn about the qualities of Venba that set it apart from other cooking games in the space and what makes those features special to the new title from Visai Studios.
Venba Distinguishes Itself as a Cooking Game With Heart and a Poignant Narrative
The niche genre of cooking games is not new in the gaming space; in fact, if one looks up “cooking games” on Google, dozens of games pop up to the point of most being indistinguishable from the rest at a quick glance. Most games play relatively the same—players control a character working in a kitchen and they must assemble dishes in a timely fashion or risk unhappy customers, less EXP, or something of the like. In some cases, like with Overcooked, players may be able to play with their friends and have to work together in puzzle-like kitchen set up, fighting for space and potentially ruining a couple friendships on the way to the goal.
Venba breaks free from this mold and sets itself apart by shifting the focus of gameplay away from a timed assembly paradigm to a story that focuses heavily on narrative instead. Cooking remains the cornerstone of this gameplay experience, but instead of making it a timed challenge the game centers it as a means of communication and persistence of culture through a variety of hardships and changes.
“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”
The central cooking mechanic of Venba lies in the mother’s collection of old, damaged recipes. Players will have the opportunity to cook up to 10 meals inspired by South Indian cuisine, each dish inspired by those that Abhi holds very close to their heart. Players will restore Venba’s old recipes as they make their way through her old cookbook and whip up recipes from her home country. Each tantalizing meal is based off of recipes players could make in real life, capturing the essence of the real thing by encapsulating key moments of the cooking process like “water splashing on a hot dosa pan or the way biryani looks when it’s cooked just right.”
Another unique way Venba’s gameplay separates itself from other cooking games is through genuine exploration of culture and cultivation of community. Abhi tells Game ZXC that one nuanced feature of the game is availability of ingredients. Venba opens in the 1980s and progresses up through the 2010s. In that time the availability of key ingredients broadens in tandem with the growth of the immigrant community in Canada, showcasing how community can lead to the preservation and enrichment of culture—both local and traditional.
“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 here”
Venba will be available day one on Game Pass, and through a close working relationship with Microsoft, Abhi tells Game ZXC that they were able to find security and pursue their vision for the game to its fullest. The result is a narrative cooking game that differentiates itself from others on the market by telling a genuine story about food and its presence at the heart of family, culture, love, loss, and more.
Venba releases on July 31 for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X.