I was looking for a Game Pass game that was short enough to quickly collect achievements for my daily rewards. The Venba game showed up in my short game searches and it was leaving at the end of last month. With the great ratings, I decided to play it via XCloud on my Steam Deck. I was also curious what a Venba even was.
Venba is the Name of the Main Cooking Character
I knew Venba involved cooking Indian food, but didn’t know if the word had any special meaning. Turns out it’s the name of the main character, the mother of an immigrant Indian family. They moved to Canada and run into probably familiar immigrant issues.
The game tells a bit of the story of at different points in their lives, then leads into cooking a recipe for that situation. Venba’s cookbook came from her grandmother and is missing pieces, or text is faded. That’s where the cooking puzzles come into play.
The game goes from the difficulty of finding a job as an Indian immigrant to some of the intolerance. By the end, the son that avoided traditions of his parents rediscovers them through cooking. The cooking puzzles are great, but the story added more purpose to the cooking.
Venba also enjoyed jamming out to Tamil music while she cooked. It added a lot of flavor (couldn’t help typing that) to the game. Too bad there’s no smell device for this game.
Solving Cooking Puzzles
Although it was nice to have a bit of story to bring meaning to the puzzles, I’ll admit I cruised through the story bits. The main fun is the cooking. Pretty much every recipe is missing details about an ingredient, measurement or steps.
In one, I had to ground down rice super fine, but couldn’t get it fine enough or use all of it (measurements are important). It was definitely a unique experience to figure out how to do all that with the cooking equipment provided.
It’s not super difficult, but satisfying. Hints are available, which I used mainly to get that achievement, but helps avoid any possible frustration. Some multilayer recipes are interesting where you don’t want to cook some ingredients too much.
Things like rotating a layer to allow steam to pass to the other layers is satisfying to solve. The graphics are cartoon style and I can’t smell the food, yet these puzzles made me hungry. I love Indian food and really enjoyed the game.
I highly recommend Venba to anyone chasing achievements, looking to actually finish a game or just Indian food lovers.
