Venba

A truly spectacular, arresting adventure-stroke-light-puzzler about immigration, culture, and parenthood. We are Venba, a Tamil woman who immigrates into Canada along with her husband in search of a new life, but as the years go by she struggles with isolation both within Canadian culture as a whole and with the fragile relationship she has with her son. Much of her love of her home becomes expressed through food, leading the player through constructing some lavish, traditional Tamil recipes where the core gameplay element is puzzling out the steps and ingredients missing from her mother's tattered cookbook. Sometimes games are frankly just special and really stick with you, and for me Venba is one of those. Playing Venba was a deeply moving experience, and a privilege to play; the experiences dramatised in Venba are ones I've never felt and in all likelihood never will. To play it was a window into a world I'd never been exposed to or asked to consider, couched as I am in a gentle privilege endemic to people who share my background. It's a story that prompted self-reflection; it's an intimate, compelling story, and one which I think is more important than ever to share in these increasingly unfriendly times.

Venba is one of the closest things you have to a movie, but in videogame form. It's a short visual novel (~1h) that has a few single screen puzzles scattered throughout that you can't fail. Narrative wise, it's great. It looks great with its distinctive artstyle, and it sounds great with its banger soundtrack, althought I can't help but imagine how awesome voice acting would be here to differentiate between English and Tamil. The plot is very personal, a bit forced, and feels very rushed -- pacing-wise, the game flies by, in my opinion even a bit too fast. The puzzles are what they are, nothing grating but also nothing great. Do I think the game is worth $14.99? No. But for a third of that price, there are worse ways to spend an hour doing something.

A game about the importance of family, culture, love and food. Positives: - Easy Mechanics - Great Story - Actually Recipes - Beautiful Art and Music Negatives: - Small game - Too easy - On the first recipe doesn't help so you need to guess how things works Overall: Because it's a small game and you dont know if you want to buy full price for 1.5h of gameplay i recommend to get it on sale. Its beautiful in all other aspects so if you get it on sale it the perfect game for something fast. I would have liked it to have more chapters so we can se the culture better and get a more variety of the story.