Cooking game Venba puts the spotlight on Tamil cuisine

It’s not obvious that sound is a vital sense in the kitchen. Taste and smell, of course, are obvious, but there’s also the saying that you eat first with your eyes, too. Cooking video games like Venba, you’re reduced down from those essential senses — there’s no way to taste, smell, or feel the food on screen — leaving only sight and sound. It’s in situations like these that you realize just how important the sounds of the kitchen are: the way garlic sizzles in oil, or how dumplings hiss with steam. In order to attract the player, any video game that focuses on cooking should appeal to their senses.

Venba is described as a narrative cooking game centered on an Indian family that immigrated to Canada from Tamil Nadu in the ’80s. Venba is a wife and mother who uses food to reconnect her family to their roots and restore lost family recipes. It’s one part visual novel and one part cooking game, all the ingredients adding up to a story Visai Games says centers on “family, love, loss, and more.”

Visai Games

Last week we hosted a preview. Venba game designer Ahbi gave media a peek at the game’s narrative and cooking game elements, but also described how the studio built a realistic sound for all the recipes in the game. Ahbi explained that everyone on the team had committed to cooking each recipe. Venba’s recipes multiple times through. “It was a huge source of reference for the art and the sound,” Ahbi said. Often, when people think about Indian food they are thinking of Tamil cuisine. However, northern Indian cuisine tends to be more prevalent in North America.

“It’s something I was very excited to showcase in VenbaIt comes with two sides, as it puts a great deal of pressure on you to make sure that the recipes are accurate and authentic. If Venba found a wider audience, we felt that responsibility very deeply.”

The cooking rule — that the team members would follow these recipes themselves — was key to making sure everyone understood the taste, texture, and, yes, sound, of southern Indian food. “Capturing the recipes accurately was important to us, and so was making the players feel like they were stepping inside Tamil kitchen,” Ahbi said. “For that, the sound design plays a very important role.”

This task has been given to VenbaNeha Patel was the sound designer who recorded all the sounds as the food was prepared. “It’s not that we wanted to make foley, necessarily, but […] it was really hard to capture these specific sounds, and there’s not a lot of existing libraries out there,” Abhi said. “Neha felt that foley was the only way to do it properly.”

Visai Games

Ahbi demonstrated this to press in videos that showed oil crackling, sputtering, and in-game footage of foods being fried. The way it was recorded required almost no editing on Visai Games’ part; the sound was able to be laid right over the in-game footage “like it was scored for this,” Ahbi said.

Beyond foley for cooking, Ahbi described the lengths the team went to to create the essential background of Tamil cooking — especially the music on the radio. There was rarely a silent moment in his home kitchen as the radio or TV would be playing. Visai Games has added a radio in the game that plays a soundtrack based on the sound of Tamil films from each decade. “In fact, it’s even more specific,” Ahbi said. “It’s designed to sound like a specific composer’s song. These songs pay homage to music directors we all admired as children. Depending on the level and the time period, the era will change with the music and song styling.” That includes a song from a music director named Devanesan Chokkalingam, or Deva, a man who has composed music for hundreds of films and for nearly 40 years. They were planning on doing a song inspired by his music, and he said he’d do it himself.

VenbaAlpha Something composed the music, which was recorded by Alpha Something and sung live by South Asian musicians. “It’s pretty rare for games, but even rarer for indie games,” Ahbi said. “But to recreate those styles of music, we needed live instruments that were signatures for different music directors.”