Venba expands the boundaries of the cooking game genre

polygon.com:

Venba is not a cooking game in the way you might expect. Food is, of course, important in games such as Cooking Mama or Overcooked, but in Venba, food is the game. Over the course of developer Visai Games’ upcoming release, which took me just over an hour to play, the studio deploys cooking mechanics as a way to explore the culture and unlock the memories of the titular Venba, an immigrant mother struggling to connect with her young son.

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The game begins shortly after Venba and her husband leave Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state, for a new life in Canada. Food, for Venba, is an act of care and a connection to her past; food is the way she shows her love, whether that’s making lunch for her husband each morning or or creating a celebratory atmosphere around each nightly dinner. Each short chapter is a vignette encapsulating a year in Venba’s life. These chapters — sometimes heartwarming, sometimes painful — progress from the early days of the family’s move to Canada, teaching moments with their young son, and conflict and heartbreak as the trio grows older.

Each chapter combines the visual novel segments with simple cooking puzzles. As Venba, you cook the recipes pulled from an old family cookbook that’s obviously well-loved — it’s battered and torn, splashed with oils and sauces. This is where the