Venba

I went into Venba expecting a pleasant cozy-game sorbet and came out having sat with the controller in my lap for a few minutes after the credits, not quite ready to go back to my backlog. That reaction surprised me. The game runs about one to two hours, tops, spread across seven chapters that jump forward in time like a family photo album missing half its pages. Each chapter is anchored by a cooking puzzle: Venba works from her mother's damaged recipe book, and the player has to decipher smudged instructions, read diagrams, piece together what ingredient goes into which pot and in what order. The puzzle difficulty scales in a way that doubles as storytelling - early recipes have a line or two missing, but by the later chapters the pages are so deteriorated you are working entirely from half-remembered images. The parallel to cultural erosion is not subtle, but it earns it. The cooking itself is forgiving, built around trial and error rather than punishment. You drag and place ingredients, manage a pressure cooker, steam idlis, layer spices into dishes you may have never heard of. The tactile detail is real - sound design was recorded during actual cooking sessions, and the in-game radio plays Tamil cinema music matched to each decade the story visits. Dishes like puttu, sambar, and kozhukattai are presented with enough visual personality that complete strangers to South Indian cuisine will find themselves curious rather than lost. That calibration is deliberate and it mostly works. The visual novel sections sit between kitchen segments. Dialogue choices exist, but they branch lightly - different sentences of context rather than different outcomes. The story knows exactly where it is going, and player agency would only slow it down. What the writing does well is resist easy emotion. The tension between Venba and her son Kavin, who grows up more Canadian than Tamil, plays out in small specific moments rather than speeches. There is a late perspective shift to Kavin that reframes the cooking puzzles in a way that is, genuinely, clever. The hand-drawn art is clean and expressive without trying to look like anything else currently on the market. The honest criticism is volume, not quality. At under two hours with no meaningful replayability beyond collecting alternate dialogue lines, the experience ends just as the characters start to feel like people rather than sketches. The time-jump structure covers decades in minutes and leaves real gaps. Players expecting a cooking sim with systems depth will find the loop thin - this is closer to interactive fiction that happens to have a kitchen in it. Critics and Steam reviewers who bounced off it were not wrong about what it lacks; they were just measuring the wrong thing. For the right player, none of that is a dealbreaker. If you have ever sat with a relative and tried to recreate a dish from memory, or felt the specific loss of a language slipping away, Venba is going to hit in a way a lot of bigger games will not. If you need twenty hours and a progression system to feel like you got your money's worth, set expectations accordingly or wait for a sale. Either way, this is a first release from a developer who clearly has something to say, and the craft to say it.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on Venba.