Venba is a story-driven game where you follow the story of Venba and Paavalan, a Indian immigrant couple that moved to Canada to have a better quality of life/opportunities. Venba works as a teacher, but always feels having a hard time to connect with her students. Paavalan is having a hard time getting a job, but is always looking into Venba's needs. There's dialogue choices that affect the answers, but I don't think that it changes the course of the story. The controls are easy to grasp and tthe music is infectious(you easily find yourself dancing on the very first seconds). The way that the game introduces Indian culinary is very integrated with the story: On the very beggining of the story, Venba can make some 'idilis' for Paavalan and is here that we cook our first recipe fom Venba's mother recipe book. The challenge here is that the book is severely damaged: Some recipes have illegible words, some are completely unreadable. On some, you have partial steps available/images and you have y guess the other; some you have nothing but Venba's memories of cooking them with her mother. Still on the beggining, we discover that Venba is having a child named Kavin (a boy); and we follow the struggles of Kavin not wanting to use his name, preferring local foods instead of Indian food; not speaking in "tamil", his home province's language. Overall, the game had everything necessary to make a compelling story and gameplay. Despite being 2 hours long, I think that's the perfect lenght to tell the story that Visai Games wanted to tell and I'm already looking foward for their next game.
