I had seen the name of Venba show up a couple times last year when it came to indie games. I saw it thrown around as the strong contender for indie game of the year if the award actually went to indie studios and not billion dollar ones. And it happened to be available on Game Pass, so I decided to give it a shot. I had had it downloaded for a while but I knew very little beyond the basic premise, so I didn't really know what to expect.
And what I found was... profoundly beautiful.
The easiest comparison I can throw around is Florence, a game that broke my heart when I played it back in early 2019. But, to be fair, Florence is a fundamentally universal game. I think Florence will speak to people in some way or form almost every time, since it is a rather universal story about love. Venba had a much harder sell initially: it is unapologetically about Tamil immigrants living in Canada, and the cooking is a framing device for telling different aspects of the multifaceted conflics of being a migrant.
I was not expecting to see the struggle of trying to get by. The tension of both direct and silent violence. This game has a hate crime in it (depicted offscreen). It has the internalized shame of being a second generation immigrant. And it uses every resource at hand to make us understand and love it all. It's a character study of a family, and of what they go thru in this specific situation.
The gameplay was real enjoyable. I played this game in front of my wife, who happens to hav been a cook for most of its life. Thinking about food in terms of puzzle was almost too immediate for me and a couple times all I had to do was to be reminded of food being food. I cook often and even then a couple things that seem obvious when in the kitchen didn't spring to mind right away. Presentation is loely, I adored the soundtrack and I loved the little UI ways to convey specific things that would have escaped me otherwise.
Food is universal and yet incredibly local. Because of that universality, we all have memories related to food. And because of that locality, they all are fascinatingly unique. I can't think of a framing better than cooking for a story that is intimiately personal since it helps make it more universal, and yet by using food, it only brings forth that uniqueness.
So far, my favorite thing I've played this year.