Venba’s Delectable Cooking Puzzles Are a Labor of Love [IGN]

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 later chapters involve more complex recipes such as biriyani and dosas.

I spoke with the Venba developers, creative director Abhi and art director Sam Elkana, earlier this year at GDC. The two are fairly new to the games industry, having just started their development journeys in 2020 with an action game called Balloon Man about a depressed superhero who can only make Balloons. It’s a very different game from Venba, but one day in the process of making it, Abhi came up with a different idea for a story about immigrant parents. He texted it in detail to Elkana, whose own experience being supported by his mother to come to Canada from Indonesia resonated with Abhi’s pitch. The two deliberated for two weeks before setting aside Balloon Man and proceeding with Venba.

Abhi is careful to tell me that the story, while derived from some personal experiences, is not autobiographical. He says that while he’s very different from Kavin, he did grow up in a Tamil community and watched many of his peers struggle to fit in.

“And slowly the gap between the parents and the kids starts to grow and grow,” he continues. “And the parents who came here hoping to give a better life for the kids, they start regretting. Especially the ones who came in the ’80s, their only friends essentially are each other and their child. And so they start to live a very lonely life as they start to grow older. And to me the immigrant media, it always focuses, I feel like, on the children’s perspective, or, ‘Oh, it’s hard for them to have two lives, one at home, one at school.’ But I wanted to focus on the parents for once because I feel like their story wasn’t told enough.”

Abhi himself isn’t a parent, which might be surprising to anyone who experiences the empathetic perspective taken in Venba. He says he’s struggled to connect with a perspective shown in a lot of media of children frustrated with their parents as they try to assimilate.

“I think I’ve seen the life that the kids are leading here and they’re making stories about, it’s still a pretty good life,” he explains. “It’s the life that many people in India are aspiring for, like to get here, to move here. And that’s why the parents take a risk and they move. And they’re 40, 50, not an ideal age to forget everybody they’ve lived with and move here.”

Specifically, Venba is told through the lens of cooking and food, a decision Abhi says he made because cultural cuisine is something that will largely stay constant over the long period of time Venba covers (from the 80s to the late 2010s). While the relationship between parents and children will change over the years, he says, food remains a steady bridge that the two can use to communicate. The team did plenty of research into South Indian and Tamil food for the game, but the work proved to be quite challenging both due to the sheer smorgasbord of food types out there, and the lack of readily available information online.

“In the beginning, Sam and I were struggling quite a bit because I wanted to showcase a wide range of South Indian cuisine and be like, ‘Oh, if you play Venba you’ll understand what South Indian cuisine is,’” Abhi says. “But I quickly realized that’s impossible because it’s super diverse. Every state in India, I would say, has more diversity in its cuisine than a country in the European Union. People think all of India is one, but it’s not. And if you travel, every 10 kilometers the cuisine changes in South India even.

“So it was really hard. And I realized that I’m approaching Venba like a tour guide for people who haven’t had that before and I shouldn’t worry about making Venba encompassing. Instead, Venba should just be an introduction. Or maybe it inspires players to look up stuff on their own.”

From there, Abhi and Elkana thought through what recipes made sense as “puzzles” for gameplay purposes, as well as what ingredients Venba would have access to in Canada in the 1980s through the early 2000s. Biriyani, for instance, appears later in the game because certain spices wouldn’t have been as accessible in the earlier years before more South Asian stores popped up in the country.

All of the food is lovingly depicted thanks to Elkana’s art direction. Elkana is inspired by older Cartoon Network animations including Samurai Jack, Dexter’s Lab, and Powerpuff Girls, which comes through in his personal work, though he admits he tried to veer a bit further away from those aesthetics in Venba. Venba is softer, he says, and has its own personality. With the food especially, Elkana worked to find a balance between a realistic and a more stylized look that would effectively capture the shapes, colors, and textures of the food but still fit with Venba’s overall tone. Elkana and Abhi both cooked and visited restaurants to try a number of different foods for inspiration – when we speak at GDC, their most recent conquest was cooking biriyani. Even separately, during the pandemic, Abhi would cook food and send photos of it to Elkana to try and replicate.

“It was very important to cook it, because if we are making it into a puzzle, if I’m changing anything about it, I need to verify,” Abhi says. “And the only way I can figure it out is by cooking it. And I would find the puzzle as I’m cooking it.”

Elkana tells me that what he’s proudest of in working on Venba is that he was able to make something sincere that “paid respect to the things that we went through.” And that sincerity comes through. The individual resonant pieces of Venba – such as the details in its food, relationships, and incredible score of homages to popular Indian music over recent decades – are topics for other writers with other experiences to dig into, and I hope they do. But as someone who has recently been deeply loved through food in a way not unlike how Venba expresses her love for Kavin, Venba truly moved me. I hope I get to have some of Moni’s chai again soon.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.