1.7 hours played
Written 20 days ago
This is what indie games are for – a work of pure love, passion and heart. In only 100 minutes of playtime, Venba achieves easily what AAA blockbuster titles can’t in 100 hours – a cast of sympathetic, well-written and fleshed-out characters, an emotionally resonating story, important and well thought-out themes and a fresh and unique perspective on life from a cultural background that we so rarely get to explore in video games.
I say rarely but I mean… is there any other video game out there depicting the [i]Tamil[/i] culture in any way? I gotta be honest with you and, knowing full well that I am betraying my own ignorance here, I’ll admit that I had no idea Tamil culture was even a thing. I didn’t know about this ethnic group at all, their language, history and values. When a game makes you look up information about something on Wikipedia to deepen your understanding of the world, it has done something right, hasn’t it?
Venba taught me not only about the Tamil people but also about the significance of food. The process of cooking and sharing meals goes way beyond providing sustenance. Food bears cultural meaning, it connects people with their ancestors, with their history and personal memories. It’s part of one’s identity too.
Identity is a core theme of Venba. The story about two Indian immigrants who move to Canada in the 1980s to seek their fortune and provide a better life for their child, is a tale about values, personal development, and cultural roots. It touches on so many aspects that immigrants are confronted with on a daily basis to this day. The story of Paavalan, the father of the family, really got to me. The way he is treated at work, his name being spelled “Pavluhn” and the fact that he had to give up writing to pursue a “career” in sales really made me feel for him. That moment with him on the park bench… I felt that, man, I felt that so hard.
I love how the game makes you adopt different perspectives on the same things throughout its relatively short runtime. As you play as the mother, Venba, for the majority of the game, you also perceive the world through her eyes and empathize with her. When she tries to teach her son the Tamil language or encourages him to try Tamil food and he rebels against that, you’re completely on her side and cannot understand the behavior of her son, Kavin. Later in the game though, you take control of Kavin and he opens up about how he always felt pressured by his parents, how he always felt like a tourist and never like his own person and how even the smell of Tamil food made him nauseous. All of a sudden you understand that he wasn’t just an ungrateful little brat but had his own, very understandable reasons to behave the way he did.
It's moments like these where the quality of the writing really shines through. This story feels authentic because it is. Nothing in this game is over-dramatized for cheap effect, every character feels like an actual person behaving naturally. This sounds simple but it’s really not. Writing believable characters that players empathize with but who also have flaws and problematic views is a feat only few writers can pull off.
I wasn’t only enamored with the writing alone. The audiovisual presentation and interface design of Venba are stellar. This watercolor-meets-paper-cutout look is so gorgeous and unique, I immediately fell in love with it. This game is colorful, beautiful, readable and the music [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEyPQ8Xb35k]absolutely[/url] fuckin [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpqCu-Cau30]slaps[/url]. When the credits rolled, I saw they had a UX designer on the team which is not super common for small indie studios but it absolutely shows. The developers put their resources exactly where they needed to be.
Venba is a very short game and it is a mechanically simple game. You spend most of your time reading text and occasionally start cooking meals based on a rough outline of a recipe where you have to fill in the blanks and improvise a bit. On a purely game-mechanics level, this is not really super engaging. For me, it doesn’t need to be. At its core, Venba is a narrative game about life as an immigrant and the importance of food as a cultural entity. It’s about human connections, the burdens of life and the sacrifices we make in pursuit of happiness. It’s a game about perspectives, about growth and letting go and it’s a one-of-a-kind experience that will stay with me for a long time.
