Visai GamesPlenty of good cooking games or at least games that feature cooking have cropped up over the years. But none are likely to make you quite as hungry, or quite as emotional, as one 2023 indie hit about a family’s relationship to food. Starting this week, you can even grab it for free on PC if you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber.Even if you miss the giveaway, Venba is a must-play for fans of narrative games and cooking sims. It tells the story of a family that immigrates from India to Canada through the eyes of an only child, focusing on the kitchen counter and the dinner table.Compared to games like Cooking Mama or Overcooked, Venba runs at a slow simmer. Rather than the high-speed dexterity tests that generally make up cooking games, it focuses on figuring out recipes through a process of trial and error and deduction. At the start of the game, the titular Venba breaks out her mother’s old recipe book only to find that it’s been partially damaged over the years. It’s still usable, it just makes cooking anything found within a bit more of a challenge than that should be. As the player, it’s up to you to fill in the gaps in Venba’s book to help her create family recipes to share with her own husband and son.Venba’s cooking mechanics are simple but satisfying. There’s nothing difficult about the execution, but completing tasks like stirring batter and stacking cooking implements in the right order are fulfilling when you’ve had to reason your way to the proper steps. As you cook, you’ll also get to listen to some great tunes on an in-game radio, while the great sound design and delicious-looking art style are bound to make you hungry — which could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective.Outside of its cooking puzzles, Venba is all about telling a good story. At the beginning, it deals with the troubles of a newly arrived family struggling to build a happy life in a new country. After contemplating returning home to southern India due to the difficulty of adjusting, the couple decides to stay when Venba gets pregnant, in the hopes that Toronto will be a better place to raise their child than their native Tamil. That eventually leads to tension as Venba and her son, Kavin, butt heads over how to honor their Indian heritage while assimilating in Canada.Venba’s cooking mechanics are great, but its story is the real star. | Visai GamesEventually, the story shifts, framing Kavin as an adult, facing a very different set of pressures from those that faced his parents. Venba’s story is an emotional one, touching on both intergenerational conflicts and the difficulty of balancing two different culture’s influences in an immigrant family. It does a deft job of portraying this struggle in human terms, and while it becomes a real tearjerker by the end, it never feels like it’s playing with your emotional to score cheap points at the expense of its larger story. As fun as it is to pore over Venba’s cookbook and piece together how to recreate her favorite recipes, it’s the story that really makes the game worth playing.Far from the typical cooking game, Venba is a short but sweet experience that just might make you rethink your own relationship with food. Where most games treat cooking as a largely mechanical challenge, here it’s a way for characters to connect with their history and with one another, as well as a source of tension when food means different things to different people. That makes it a bit of a heavy meal, but one worth savoring whether you’re trying it for the first time or coming back for seconds.Venba is available now on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC.