Over the last few years, video games that feature cooking have found their way to gaming consoles. One of the latest entries in the virtual food genre is Venba, released by Toronto-based indie studio Visai Games. "The artists and I were working on a completely different game, actually. It was a very traditional action game," says Venba’s designer and developer, who goes by Abhi. Reflecting on a childhood incident where he translated, in Tamil, between his friend and another boy's mother made an impression on him. "Even at that age, that really bothered me, the idea of needing a translator for your own son," Abhi says. "I found that very troubling and interesting. I thought it would be good to make a game that would explore that feeling."
Within minutes, Abhi decided the action of the game would be cooking and how, for families with broken connections, food becomes a crucial love language. His aim was to create an emotional narrative, giving the players (and the character) a strong reason for why a dish was cooked that day and what it means to the other characters in the game.
Venba covers the period from 1988 through 2016, so the team did a lot of research. If ingredients for a dish were expensive, it made more sense for it to appear in the game during a period when the economy was strong.
Abhi says the Tamil community has been enthusiastic: "A lot of the YouTubers played the game with their moms."
"I wanted the player to think about the recipe while they were making the food," says Abhi, who developed Venba as a step-by-step instruction for players to assemble dishes. Photo courtesy of Visai Studios.