Venba’s Delectable Cooking Puzzles Are a Labor of Love

ign.com:

There’s a beautiful scene in the second half of Venba where Venba, a mother with an adult son, spends all day joyfully cooking a veritable feast of different foods. The scene is wonderfully executed in so many ways - the context, the timing of the cooking and the music, and the way Venba’s confidence in the kitchen comes across through gameplay. But what had me in tears well before the actual emotional turning point of the scene was how clearly the developers managed to convey food as an expression of relentless love.

When I went to meet my fiance’s family in Georgia for the first time in 2021, I too was loved in this way. I didn’t grow up in a household where cooking happened with any regularity, so it wasn’t until meeting Amma and Moni for the first time that I learned what it meant to be loved intensely through food. I was loved through hot chai pressed into my hands first thing in the morning, through gazing daunted at so many plates of singara, and through hauling a massive suitcase of biriyani and spinach and lamb home that we ate effortlessly for weeks after.

Venba is a story about what was happening on the other side of that kind of love. It follows a woman named Venba, her husband Paavalan, and their son Kavin through a number of key moments in their lives. These range from Venba finding out she’s pregnant with Kavin in the 1980s, shortly after the family has immigrated to Canada from India, through Kavin as a grown adult in the 2010s. In each chapter, Venba and Kavin explore their familial relationships through food, which plays out in puzzles where the player guides them through a smudged, half-remembered, incomplete family recipe. The first chapter, for instance, goes through the process of making idlis, while