Critique Blog 3: Venba
Game Metadata
Game Name: Venba
Designer/Developer: Visai Games
Platform: PC, Nintendo Switch, Playstation, Xbox
High-level Instructional Goal: Using food and traditions to discuss generational differences and the effects of immigration and acculturation.
Link: https://venbagame.com/
Educational Goals
Venba is a narrative cooking game where you play as an Indian mom who immigrates to Canada with her family. Following the parents and their son grow through various years of their lives, the game focuses on expressing familial love through food. Through dialogue and cooking puzzle games, players learn about the intangible cultural heritage of Tamil food and traditions and how to navigate the nuances of generational and cultural differences resulting from immigration and acculturation.
The game’s primary educational goal is focused on introducing Tamil culture through the lens of food. No prior knowledge is necessary for the players to enjoy and learn through this game. The game welcomes players from every background and sheds light on the conflicting emotions of immigrant life. Venba offers two potential avenues for knowledge transfer. First, the game’s cooking portion is based on real Tamil recipes, closely following the steps involved in the recipes. Players can take these recipes and recreate them in real life, as well as identify recipes and cultural practices/tools belonging to the Tamil people. Second, the game fosters the development of empathy skills for people of different cultures and backgrounds. Venba excels in crafting a touching and bittersweet story that documents the nuances of immigration and its effects on dynamics within immigrant families. Depending on the player’s identity, they can either empathize or sympathize with the narrative, influencing how they view their own family or immigrants in general.
Game Elements
The game itself is a narrative game with simple point-and-click actions. The game only takes roughly a little over an hour to play. The Core Gameplay Loop is to read some dialogue, look at a recipe, follow/solve the recipe, and repeat.
The player’s main objective is to follow the progression of character dynamics between the three family members in the game, Venba (mother), Paavalan (father), and Kavin (son). The game is formatted as a series of chapters that introduce key narrative elements, where a portion of cooking puzzle-solving accompanies dialogue.
The nouns are narrative plot, dialogue choices, and recipes.
The verbs are read, cook, select, click, and drag.
The game has a linear storyline, so the player experience is not overly complex. Despite being presented with dialogue choices, the decisions all lead to the same plot, making no difference if you choose one choice over another. Following the story of the family, the game tugs on the emotions of players as we witness impactful life events pass through the game. We watch the conflicts and loss (of identity, language, and life) that arise from the immigrant experience.
The game utilizes various ways to demonstrate the challenges of cultural erosion and disconnect between the Kavin and Venba, such as the rough translations of the recipes by the Kavin and the muddied speech dialogue from Kavin when speaking to Venba. Both of these instances highlight the language barrier that often exists with immigrant families.
The cooking mechanics of the game are different for each recipe, with the recipes losing more detail as the game progresses. The cooking mechanics are straightforward, where players only have to use some minor guesswork to figure out how to cook the dishes.
Learning Mechanics
The learning mechanism the game is trying to impact is sense-making and understanding. However, the game does not explicitly use learning science principles to communicate something is to be learned. There is very little cooking in the game, whereas it focuses more on the visual novel and uses narrative as a way of communicating complex ideas around immigration and family.
However, with what is there for cooking, the game follows closely to how ingredients and tools interact with each other in real life. The cooking puzzles are 1:1 to real recipes.
I took principles from Gee’s Principles of Learning in Games.
Situated Meaning Principle
The game takes language, traditions, food, and conversation and places them in the lens of the embodied immigration experience. The game demonstrates the interconnectedness of these concepts and how deeply they are tied to culture, memory, and familial relationships. Food is no longer just food, it is a way of communicating the cultural rifts between Venba and Kavin, as well as trying to bridge these rifts later in life with grown-up Kavin’s mistranslated recipe instructions. The tools used in the game are not just tools, they are situated within a culture and a family.
Multimodal Principle
Despite the game being a narrative, it utilizes visual, text, and audio to bring the story and cooking to life. The game seamlessly integrates the audio-visual mix of cooking sounds and animations that does justice to the depiction of food in a game format.
Cultural Models about the World Principle
The game engages the players to think consciously and reflectively about their own cultural models regarding the world by presenting the cultural models held by immigrants and the family in Venba. Players either sympathize or relate to the family dynamics and conversations played out in Venba. As a second-generation immigrant, it pushed me to evaluate my own relationships with my culture and parents. Those who don’t necessarily relate to the story's circumstances can reevaluate how they approach immigrants and individuals with different cultural backgrounds.
Overall Critique
While the game is not explicitly educational, it effectively weaves a rich and moving narrative that prompts players to contemplate their connections with immigrants, whether through direct lineage or knowing individuals from immigrant backgrounds. The narrative immerses players in Tamil culture, rich with cultural details spanning music, decor, recipes, and language. Players are effortlessly exposed to the essence of Tamil culture and the complexities arising from generational and cultural shifts due to immigration and acculturation.
Although the food puzzles serve as a bridge for cultural exploration and introduce recipes, they do not serve as comprehensive cooking tutorials. The lack of repetition across different recipes limits the reinforcement of cooking techniques learned previously. As the game progresses, the puzzles may lose coherence, diminishing the educational aspect of cooking, but emphasizing the cultural gaps between characters.
Despite its brevity — only an hour of gameplay — and lack of replayability, the visual novel captivates with its stunning visual-audio mix, bringing Venba’s story to life. As a second-generation immigrant, Venba provides a sincere and beautiful perspective on parenthood and the sacrifices our immigrant parents made to provide a better life for their children.
