Venba has been on my radar for more than a year now. A narrative-cooking game based on South Indian cuisine is too good a hook to ignore, and I was left hungry for more after playing the demo.
I was beyond excited when it was announced to launch on Game Pass, and jumped in eagerly with high expectations.
My sentiment after playing the game echoes that of many steam reviews: the game is good, but short.
It has seven chapters, each narrating the tale of a different time in the protagonist Venba’s life, as she struggles to adapt to life as an immigrant in Canada. Along the way, we cook an assortment of South Indian dishes. A cooking game without the pressure of a timer or pleasing customers is a nice change of pace!
The only problem the game has is its pacing. It tries to cover a lot of ground within its short playtime, meaning that time skips are a frequent occurrence, and they make you wonder if a whole lot of the story was cut to budget constraints.
In seven levels, we see Venba give birth to her son, who then grows up, graduates college, and faces his own struggles with his identity as the child of an immigrant family. That’s a lot of story to unpack in less than two hours of gameplay!
The cooking mechanic also suffers a bit due to the pacing. There are a couple of levels where you barely cook anything, and then in the next one, you go through a cooking marathon, which suits the plot, but feels like a rushed attempt to make up for missing gameplay.
As an amateur game developer, it surprises me that this was the amount of content the developers could come up with in more than two years of development. The art, music and script are all quite good, but there’s clearly something that happened behind the scenes that resulted in a shorter than intended game. I would love to see the developers tell the story behind the making of the game.
On the plus side, it’s great to see the game receive universal acclaim. I have nothing against shorter games, but $15 for a 2-hour videogame is going to get quite a few people grumbling. At least it’s available on Game Pass, so that’s good for GP subscribers. Do not miss this one!
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