It's peaceful and calming. Cleaning the waste left behind and revitalizing this alien ocean is a really great experience. It succeeds in being cute, heartwarming and the enviromental message is a strong one.

The first Loddle found while cleaning I named onion. He liked kelp tacos and I regularly checked in on him. The Loddles are great at showing the impact your cleaning has on the environment. Watching them grow and play is the real reward for what you are doing.

It's simple, not very long and it's just overall really good. I would recommend Loddlenaut to cozy game lovers or just those who have a fondness of the ocean.

If you thought that the hidden-cat-like games were thriving this year, wait until you see how the introspective-cooking genre did this year; we got a ton of them and the ones I played were bangers!... Sure, I might just have played two, but still!

There's a sweetness to Venba that feels distant and incredibly familiar both at the same time: the elements that comprise its story aren’t anything new, these beats and themes have been seen time and time again in a myriad of ways, but what makes this little tale so special is how it uses all off them to create something unique, so deeply personal, like a delicious meal which contains ingredients time and time again, but prepared in such a way it forms its own special flavor… or like tasting food that now only persists in your childhood memories.

I’m completely alien to Tamil culture, a statement which I sadly could repeat when talking about many others, and I was raised in the land my family and ancestors were born, and yet nothing is lost on me; far more capable and intelligent people than me have talked about this in great length, but the globalization and specifically the ‘’Americanization’’ of the west is a sight that bears terrible results in the long run; instead of different cultures interacting with one another and understanding each other’s traditions and evolving and changing together, we see how little by little everything changes into not an unification, but to a macroculture of sorts imposed by multinationals and enterprises in every facet of the day to day life, only taking what sees of value and implementing it while treating the rest as lesser or nothing more that a novelty to look at and treat as a toy, like a hoarding dragon burning everything on its wake but adding the shiny stuff he finds to its pile. Venba doesn’t analyze these problems directly, but it speaks about its consequences through the life of a immigrant Indian family in Canada. Kavin neglects its culture not because he doesn’t care, not because he likes that his schoolmates call him Kevin, but because he’s terrified at the idea of being cast away by his peers and society because of it, he’s deeply scared of presenting himself as ‘’odd’’, as something that doesn’t fit, something alien. That sentiment persists through adulthood, only now its peers treat his past which he couldn’t really never connect as something ‘’neat’’, a cool thing to put on TV that’s aesthetically pleasing, something that can only exist on its vacuum, being judged while expected to be nice to look at. The moment Kavin finally reconnects with his mother and what he didn’t want to face is beautiful for many reasons, but one of them is that is an act of defiance and perseverance, and even if he doesn’t know everything about his roots, it doesn’t matter, he’s learning, he’s improving what came before and completing it, all through just having a nice cooking session with his mother, and that’s just… beautiful, there isn’t any other way to put it.

Preparing said dishes isn’t nothing really complicated or actually involved, but it manages to make it feel like it; you aren’t merely clicking and dragging on sone stuff, you are deciphering and learning ways to prepare plates of Venba’s past, seeing her remember in what order everything is needed to be done until everything is second nature to her, and it’s appetizing as it is cathartic. The game has achievements for making everything perfect, but also for screwing up, and I cannot think of another way of showing what this is all about beyond the game itself; it doesn’t matter if you fumble de bag, you are cooking, you are learning, and maybe you’ll do that mistake 4 times more but it doesn’t matter, ‘cause it’s still fun and fulfilling… and that’s what brought back memories.

I was originally gonna make fun of a moment that reminded me of that scene in Ratatouille (you know the one) but then I realized how insincere and condescending I sounded, ‘cause it’s also a moment I myself have experienced, the memory of my parents, my mother, my father, showing my how to prepare food, how to make desserts that to this day I cherish, but some that I haven’t tasted since then. Venba is not only a story about culture and its loss, it also can be seen about family and bonds, about sharing the little moments, both good and bad, and of ultimately you yourself deciding what you want to do or who you want to be, but your true loved one being always there during the whole process. It’s about regrets, the regrets of Venba, the regrets of Paavalan, and the regrets of Kavin, and the hardships of them all.

A stroll through the steam reviews shows just how many people have connected to this story, many driven to tears, to remember their past and their lives, reflected through this little 90 minute experience. I myself connected to it in a different way, and I just look at Venba wishing it sometimes was a bit slower, that it took the time to explore certain ideas, because I really wanted to see more, to experience more passages of this fragmented story, to see this family’s life, both in its happy and sad times.

And still, in just seven chapters, Venba makes me relish the past, my own memories, and it’s simple worth being seen, worth being valued… and why nor, worth crying for.

This year, over here a staggering amount of kids and even teenagers celebrated Halloween during the 31 of October and 1st of November, effectively making the festivity that would usually take place in Galicia during those days, Samain, completely ignored, and with it, its specific plates and traditions. As I said, at the end, everyone is free to choose what they wish to do, what they wish to celebrate it, and I’m not villainizing this fact whatsoever… but I want to truly appreciate those that still kept the tradition because they truly wanted too, because they really like it, because they consider it a part of themselves, and that goes for everyone in the world, of every country, of every culture.

That isn’t something to be ashamed of.

That’s something to be celebrated unlike any other thing.

Well fuck. I'm not surprised that I liked Venba, but I am surprised I liked it this much.

It does feel a bit strange that it took this long for me to find a narrative-based cooking game; most of the cooking video games I've seen are either arcade-scoring style minigame collections (your Cooking Mamas), restaurant management titles like Cook, Serve, Delicious!, or sandboxes that felt so simple and structureless that they basically turned into meme simulators for me past the five minute mark. Conversely, Venba more closely resembles what I expect of my idealized cooking game: it emphasizes the puzzle-like qualities of cooking via mastering techniques at the right time (something that no other game I'm aware of has really capitalized upon) while also using cooking as a narrative vessel to impart past memories of learning/executing recipes and thoroughly exploring culture via the medium of the culinary arts. Granted, Venba's puzzles are easy enough to navigate but still aren't free, and that does wonders in aiding its lean towards storytelling: without spoiling too much, entire sections of recipes are often missing, and thus part of the fun is filling out the gaps as the player to "correct" the dishes. You won't get penalized unlike a restaurant sim though, and that's the fun of cooking! Sometimes, you just want to experiment a little and try out new techniques, and if you mess up, that's just kitchen learning in a nutshell.

What I wasn't expecting though, was just how deeply I resonated with the narrative. My immediate family and I are immigrants, and quite frankly, I've inquired a little here and there about what they've sacrificed to move to the US, but I clearly haven't asked enough. While I've never genuinely felt ashamed of my own culture, I've absolutely felt the pressure to "fit in" and in many cases, felt a bit of the old embarrassment rise up again from playing this game due to how disconnected I've often felt from my old home city versus having now lived in the states for a while. English isn't my first language, but it may as well have been now given my difficulties writing and sometimes speaking my old language, and losing my grasp of all these things that were once more familiar to me has always been a sore point in my life. This game is a reminder to me that even if I may have grown up in an entirely different world than my parents, they're still my family at the end of the day regardless of cultural differences and it's still my past; I might have had years slip by where I chose to remain intentionally apathetic to parts of my family's heritage, but that doesn't mean that I can't start catching up now to try and make up for lost ground.

The game is only about an hour long with just six recipes included (and a couple near the end are a bit too guided), but I'm willing to overlook its brevity because this experience is going to sit with me for a while: it almost feels like it was written for me at times. Definitely one of the best surprises to come out this year. Thank you for the meal, Venba. Think I'm gonna go call my parents now and tell them how much I've missed them.

As a medium, food is rather underrated. I don't mean that in the sense that it provides sustenance and sensual pleasures, but rather in terms of the information it can convey. Mediums, after all, are tools for communication and are defined by what they provide directly to the recipient and what they leave to interpretation. Venba, for example, left without the senses of taste and touch, uses its vibrant art and lively music to convey the appeal of its food, and does so wonderfully. In the case of the medium of food, it carries with it cultural history, geographic context, our tastes and preferences, shared knowledge and tradition, and the product of collective and individual experimentation, and most importantly, our labor and care for each other. This is what makes the somewhat narratively contrived puzzle mechanic of the incomplete cookbook a compelling metaphor, it shows how cultural knowledge can be lost and restored across generations, provided the effort is put into preserving it. The actual plot of Venba explores the pain that can happen when direct communication fails at helping its characters understand each other, but it also shows the beauty in that such methods leave room for us to connect through more abstract means.