“Venba” is a video game that takes players on a journey, following an Indian mother’s story of immigrating to Canada, through food.
Unlike other cooking games that have more of an “arcade” approach, in “Venba,” players cook South Indian cuisine through puzzle mechanics, which creator Abhijeeth (Abhi) Swaminathan says puts a focus on the recipe themselves.
The cozy gameplay features a “90s cartoon aesthetic” and incorporates a Tamil soundtrack, while players connect through family storylines, as a mother and son work to restore age-old recipes with their own unique flair.
Developed by Toronto-based Visai Games, the premise of the game follows a couple who moves to Canada from India, highlighting the main character — and mother — Venba. She and her husband have a son named Kavin, and although she wants to teach her son to cook, pages from her recipe book have been ripped up, instructions lost to the passage of time.
Players then must learn to recreate the recipes through puzzles, while Kavin grows up and works to reconnect with his South Asian heritage.
“Especially in immigrant families, I find food becomes the bridge between first-generation immigrants and their assimilated children,” Swaminathan told gaming outlet Game Developer.
“I thought it would be interesting to explore this story through the lens of food. I wanted to explore how the family grows and changes in their time in Canada. To measure if something is changing, you need something that stays constant, and to me, food seemed like the perfect fit.”
Something that stands out is also that Kavin speaks English, while his mother, the titular Venba, speaks Tamil. The choice to lead with a maternal character was intentional, as well as capturing the divide between immigrant parents and their children.
“A lot of the [existing] media … focuses on immigrant pain or parents really pushing for their culture, and they want you to speak the language,” Swaminathan told NPR.
“I wanted to hone in on that. Why, though? Why is it important to them? What have they given up? What have they sacrificed? I thought that was left untold, and that's what always bothered me … That's where I think the effort to capture that came from.”
The game is now available for purchase on Steam and has a slew of “very positive” reviews from players — many of which affirm Swaminathan’s efforts to make it with love.
“My producer said this is the kind of game that would make people call their moms,” Swaminathan said. “I remember thinking that if that happened, I would be really happy with it. Since the game released, there’s been an outpour of accounts of people contacting me to say that they called their mom as soon as they finished the game.”
A version of this article was originally published in The 2025 Food Edition of the Goodnewspaper.
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Header image courtesy of Visai Games/Steam
