Video Game Venba Lets You Cook Your Way to Your Roots

A video game about cooking traditional South Indian food is moving players to tears and picking up the phone to call their parents.

Venba, created by Toronto-based Visai Games, tells the story of an Indian mother who immigrates to Canada with her husband and raises a son named Kavin. The game's puzzle mechanics challenge players to recreate authentic South Indian recipes from a damaged cookbook, with pages torn and instructions lost to time.

Creator Abhijeeth Swaminathan designed the game around a specific immigrant experience: the cultural gap between parents and their children. Kavin speaks English while his mother speaks Tamil, mirroring the divide many immigrant families navigate daily.

"Especially in immigrant families, I find food becomes the bridge between first-generation immigrants and their assimilated children," Swaminathan told Game Developer. He wanted to explore what parents sacrifice when they leave their homeland, a perspective he felt was missing from other immigrant stories.

The game features a 90s cartoon aesthetic and Tamil soundtrack. Players work through cooking puzzles while watching Kavin grow up and gradually reconnect with his South Asian heritage through his mother's recipes.

Unlike fast-paced cooking games, Venba slows down to focus on the recipes themselves. Each dish becomes a conversation between generations, a piece of culture passed down through careful instruction and shared meals.

Why This Inspires

Swaminathan's producer predicted the game would make people call their moms. That prediction came true in ways that exceeded expectations.

Since its release on Steam, players have flooded Swaminathan with messages about reaching out to their parents immediately after finishing the game. The reviews on Steam are overwhelmingly positive, with players praising the emotional depth and cultural authenticity.

The game captures something universal through a specific lens: the longing for connection, the weight of what gets lost in translation, and the simple act of cooking together as an expression of love. Food becomes more than sustenance. It becomes memory, identity, and home.

Venba proves that video games can do more than entertain—they can heal the distances between us, one recipe at a time.