How Venba captures the sounds of Tamil cuisine

polygon.com:

You might not immediately think of sound as one of the senses essential in cooking. Taste and smell, of course, are obvious, but there’s also the saying that you eat first with your eyes, too. In a cooking video game like Venba, you’re reduced down from those essential senses — there’s no way to taste, smell, or feel the food on screen — leaving only sight and sound. It’s in situations like these that you realize just how important the sounds of the kitchen are: the way garlic sizzles in oil, or how dumplings hiss with steam. A video game about cooking must pull on these sense memories to entice the player.

Venba is described as a narrative cooking game centered on an Indian family that immigrated to Canada from Tamil Nadu in the ’80s. You play as Venba, a mother and wife who is using food to connect her family members back to their heritage and, in turn, restoring lost family recipes. It’s one part visual novel and one part cooking game, all the ingredients adding up to a story Visai Games says centers on “family, love, loss, and more.”

During a preview hosted last week, Venba game designer Ahbi gave media a peek at the game’s narrative and cooking game elements, but also described how the studio built a realistic sound for all the recipes in the game. Ahbi said the entire team committed to cooking all Venba’s recipes multiple times through. “It was a huge source of reference for the art and the sound,” Ahbi said. He noted that Tamil cuisine is not always the food that comes to mind when someone thinks of Indian food; northern Indian cuisine is more common in North America.

“It’s something I was very excited to showcase in Venba, but it comes with a double-edged sword because it comes with a lot of pressure to show