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Rate five things you know, from any shelf. Your archetype shows up in about a minute, and gets sharper with every log.
Puzzle, Simulator, Adventure, Indie
OpenCritic83IGDB87
Venba is a narrative cooking game, where you play as an Indian mom, who immigrates to Canada with her family in the 1980s. Players will cook various dishes and restore lost recipes, hold branching conversations and explore in this story about family, love, loss and more.
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Inward, contemplative, tiny and meticulous.
1 profiled raters. Loved most by The Prestige Hunters.
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A few lines from each review; the whole review is on the critic's site. Not part of Taste Buds's numbers.
GamesRadar+Hirun CryerJul 20234.5/5 stars"Venba perfectly melds together a story of generational anxieties and dreams"
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Hardcore GamerKyle LeClairAug 20234.5/5Through a exploration of Southern Indian cuisine and the preparation of it that's been given a slight puzzler twist, Venba manages to serve up a captivating story about culture, motherhood, immigrant life and more, spiced up with likeable characters and great dialogue, and topped off with eye-catching visuals and an ear-pleasing soundtrack. It's a short feast, but a filling one, so it would be wise to give it a shot. Would it help if we said that it might remind you of a rocket somehow?
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God is a GeekLyle CarrJul 20239/10Venba is a lovely little narrative game about the struggle of raising a child as immigrants told via food, but it'll be over too quickly for some.
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VGChartzLee MehrSep 20235.5/10Visai Games' narrative-cooking debut is a special case of over-relying on flavorful spices – music, art design, etc. – to compensate for paltry servings.
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Slant MagazineSteven ScaifeJul 20233/5 starsOnly toward the end does Venba hit upon a cohesive solution for both its story and its puzzles. The perspective shifts from Venba to Kavin, whose complicated relationship with his parents’ culture reframes the friction inherent to the game’s cooking segments: He has difficulty because he hasn’t prepared these dishes before and hasn’t cared to pay attention. Furthermore, his grasp on the Tamil language is rusty, so while he can refer to instructions at the top of the screen, they’ll be inaccurately translated and require the player to experiment while surmising their true meaning. This late change allows the game to finish strong, though the irritation of its earliest puzzles never quite dissipates, like a lingering taste from a dish whose flavors don’t fully cohere.
Read the reviewSnippets via OpenCritic, where 83% of critics recommend it.
IGDB rating 8.0/10 from 63 ratings.
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