Venba is a delightful puzzle cooking game about family
The pitch for Venba is solid. Cooking games are a great time, and that alone would’ve at least piqued my interest. But where Visai Games’ Venba secured my attention wasn’t just the cooking itself, but what the cooking represented: history, family, home, and a connection to your roots, even in the unfamiliar.
I got to play a short demo as part of the Tribeca Games selection this year. It was just one chapter, a short cooking session bookended by narrative sections that set up the recipe creation. Venba follows Venba herself, who’s immigrated from India to Canada along with her husband.
The pair is nervous, wondering if the move was the right choice. Venba is tired and a bit frazzled, but when her husband suggests he’ll simply live off the coffee machine for lunch, she insists on getting up and cooking him a quick to-go meal. It’s a very relatable moment.
Venba started me off with idli, and this is where I will fully admit that I’m not very familiar with the Tamil cuisine showcased here. In some ways, this made me a perfect test subject for the puzzles in Venba; when it put a stove, racks, a batter, and other cooking accoutrement in front of me, it took me a moment just to gather my bearings. I like to cook, but I’ve never tried anything like idli.
The key is to use Venba’s recipe cookbook to figure everything out. It starts off with a simple recipe from her mother, which Venba says always turn out a little better than hers. The puzzle is to solve how, using her instructions.
Feel free to cue up a mental montage of me flailing about, concocting some harebrained attempts until I finally locked in the answer. (No spoilers, but it involves steam.) It was a fun, enjoyable puzzle that I enjoyed solving. But I was also taken in
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