Venba Critic Reviews

Venba beautifully depicts the struggle of the first-generation immigrant experience — fighting to give your family better opportunities while holding true to your roots. It’s a golden example of how games can give players an authentic peek into underrepresented cultures when the right people are in charge. With the game being beatable in a sleek two hours, it’s impossible not to give Venba an incredibly high recommendation.

Venba is a must-play experience, an enthralling tale of immigrants across multiple generations, all backed by a brilliantly absorbing puzzle game in the form of cooking.

Venba is a heartfelt tale of an immigrant mother doing her best to raise a son in Canada while passing on her Tamil culture. It’s a story not often told, and it will stick with you long after the credits roll. Learning about this culture is a ton of fun and done through inventive puzzles having you cook traditional dishes. It’s a gorgeous, passionate game that gives you a glimpse into another culture.

Through a exploration of Southern Indian cuisine and the preparation of it that’s been given a slight puzzler twist, Venba manages to serve up a captivating story about culture, motherhood, immigrant life and more, spiced up with likeable characters and great dialogue, and topped off with eye-catching visuals and an ear-pleasing soundtrack. It’s a short feast, but a filling one, so it would be wise to give it a shot. Would it help if we said that it might remind you of a rocket somehow?

Venba could have been my story. Or your story, if you know what means to be the son (or the daughter) of a couple who moved to give you a better future at the cost of giving up to pass on their roots. And it’s awesome a video game could tell this very thing in about two hours of gameplay and stay in your memories forever.

It’s easy to finish Venba in one sitting, but the game’s complicated narrative, it’s exploration of family relationships, identity, and hardship, will linger in my mind for so much longer than it took me to play through it.

While the specificities of lead developer Abhi's lived experience give Venba its distinctive flavour, they serve a story with which anyone can identify.

Venba is a sweet, short-lived episode that presents the place held by food and cooking within our lives and cultures as near-on divine. It explores familiar relationships, as well as the ones we keep, for better or worse, with food itself, and left me with plenty to ponder as the credits rolled.

Food and family converge in this beautiful slice-of-life tale.

Venba’s portrayal of the complex diasporic family dynamic is spot-on. It’s a perfect portrait of the challenges and wistfulness that come with trying to live a life while being torn between two completely different cultures. I’d like to think that Venba is ultimately a hopeful narrative in the end, an emotional, cathartic celebration of it all. But whatever the interpretation, Venba is an essential depiction of the immigrant experience.

Having South Asian developers, all with different experiences, means Venba is a narrative cooking adventure about an immigrant mother’s life that feels authentic. It is told through her culture’s cuisine in a way that will make players empathize and sympathize. But it isn’t downbeat or drab, it’s vivid, colorful, and inspiring. Its ending, however, had me sit there and grapple with my thoughts after its two-hour playtime, thinking about how it is never too late in life to discover or rediscover your racial/cultural identity as a South Asian individual. Sometimes a recipe for idli can be the first step in finding the resolve to be yourself and discovering pride in your roots.

Venba is an interesting and thoughtful experience that lasts as it should and that, in about a couple of hours, is able to make you feel attached to its characters and themes.

Venba is an exercise in brevity. I greatly enjoyed my peek into the lives of strangers who exposed me to a culture different than mine. I just wish I could have got a longer look at it.

Though I genuinely loved my time with Venba, I could not swallow the steep asking price for the short, one-hour experience that you will have. It's a great, tear-jerking story that immigrants will resonate with, but there isn't enough here to justify the entry fee.

Venba’s story offers a resonant, refreshingly unvarnished look at immigrant struggles, though the cooking segments don’t always gel with the story.

Pretty colours, smell of spice, they couldn’t dull my senses enough to not notice all of Venba’s imperfections. The characters aren’t very nice, the conversations tend to say nothing of substance, the story never reaches the required depths. But it’s short enough for it to be a cute visit of Indian culture and cuisine.

Although there are some elements that could've been improved with more time to bubble on the stove, Venba's visual novel-style conversations and gorgeous cooking puzzles complement each other perfectly. The result is a heartwarming love letter to immigrant parents, Tamil culture, and the food that raised us.

I would have loved more Venba, with its vibrant sound, touching story, and mouthwatering food, and yet, I still feel like Visai Games has told a complete, focused story.

Although Venba’s gameplay boils down to practice making perfect, its cooking puzzles and narrative also work together to perfectly illustrate the trials Venba’s family is facing. By pulling you into this process, it builds a bridge of empathy for players like myself, helping us relate to the loss that comes with growing apart from one’s family and the love that keeps you tethered to them while you forge your own path. Pairing that all too relatable human experience with the making of a bounty of delicious meals I’d like to try my hand at IRL is just the icing on the puttu.