Steam Nextfest is over but I played a significant amount of demos that will go on until the end of the world; that or until the next Nexfest. I wanted to branch ouit a little this week and play a couple of narrative games and found a demo and full-fledged game. This week is about love loss and cooking. This week is Venba!

Venba is a cooking narrative game from Visai Games. The game will release for all of those modern gaming devices on July 31st, 2023.

Venba takes place in the 1980s as it follows the story of a South Indian family and their immigration to Canada and the connection to their homeland through food rediscovery. Not everything is great in the family as depression and discussion of children take the stage in the demo.

Venba‘s demo is strictly a narrative game with a few minigames sprinkled in. In this instance, a food native to South India, Idli. Idli is a rice cake made from steamed rice batter and urad lentils (TheWingedFork). The mini-game it self is pretty self-explanatory as the minigames are used to break up the narrative section. Everything is given to the player to succeed, but actually engaging and paying attention to detail is essential to succeeding in the minigame.

Hand-drawn visuals and animations really make Venba a joy to look at. It’s not just the character design that shines in this game, it is the food that looks stunning as well. The color really adds such a nice touch to the game. Lots of warm colors mixed in with this beautiful shade of red. The end result of the Idli with the chutney looks damn good. Superb work on visuals

Venba’s demo was very short, about ten minutes, but in that ten minutes, I was grabbed by the visuals, the story, and the themes. I like learning about cultures, and to experience these cultures through video games is a delight. The narrative had enough to keep me intrigued, the visuals are beautiful and the minigames are enough to keep me interested.