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Jan. 9th, 2025 02:53 pm
Game Impressions: Venba; Doors - Paradox
Something I want to do this year is 1) play more games instead of just the one MMO, and 2) write up my thoughts on them. Not necessarily reviews, but more my impressions. Partially because writing this down will help me remember these games, but mostly because I also want to write more this year and this helps me pad out my word count lol.
Completed: 1/1/2025
Playtime (to base completion): 1.5 hours
Purchased on Steam via Humble Choice December 2024
A short narrative game about a immigrant family from India who settled in Canada. The general advertising and the demo focused more on the cooking, but the main focus is really the story. Across the 7 chapters, five I’d call “true” cooking puzzles, one is really a plating sequence, and one chapter doesn’t have cooking at all. I do appreciate that they added recipes and music tracks in a later patch - both because yeah, that food looks tasty, and because the content you get felt a bit sparse otherwise. I wish we actually cooked the plating sequence, since that was half a dozen dishes and we did none of the prep work.
In terms of story, I particularly enjoyed Kavin/Kevin’s perspective. The whole “rejection -> guilt -> reexploration” narrative is just something that feels really personal. This kind of cultural struggle, alienation, and rejection tends to get overlooked when portraying experiences of diaspora, and the game even alludes to that, with Kavin’s coworker wanting fully positive and accepted cultural diversity in the scene they were working on. And I mean, it’s really nice that there’s even enough people to provide those sorts of positive representations, and enough conscientiousness for that to be desired at all. And if I had to choose one kind of representation, of course I’d choose the positive version. But this sort of complicated, messy relationship with identity, and having to grapple with that in a society that has become more accepting than how I was as a child, resonated a lot with me.
Also, the way the game handled Tamil in both perspectives was also really neat! With Venba’s perspective, you had different colored text when they spoke in Tamil vs. English, and there were also “splotched” text boxes from Kavin when he used more complicated English words. And with Kavin’s perspective, I really, really appreciated how the cookbook appears in Tamil and Kavin has to translate it line by line and makes mistakes along the way. I liked that we revisited Venba’s restored cookbook at all. It was just a really sweet moment to see her work, and for Kavin to continue it too.
The ability to scroll through the text messages in a couple sequences was also something I appreciate from a game design perspective. This kind of flavor texts with ambient narratives is something unique to video games and other interactive mediums, and would’ve been omitted or heavily truncated in other mediums simply because it would take up precious space.
Overall, I enjoyed it! I wish there were more gameplay aspects, but the story (and art, and music) were great. Probably not going for 100% achievements, since getting the remaining achievements involves going through the chapters again and there’s no way to skip directly to the food portion.
Completed: 1/9/2025
Playtime (100%): 5.7 hours
Received for free via Epic Games Store
An escape room puzzle game. The game consists of three chapters, with about 40 levels total. Each level has two gems (blue and red) plus a story note, and if you collect all the gems of each particular color in a chapter you unlock an extra level.
I did not particularly love the puzzles. They range from incredibly easy to frustratingly glitchy to things that weren’t even intended to be puzzles but are just obtuse because of the way the game works. Thankfully, there is a free “skip puzzle” button, and admittedly I did use it a couple times. A couple puzzles that I otherwise knew how to solve were too glitchy to complete; one of them straight up did not respond. I almost used the button for a physics-based puzzle but then the physics glitched out and let me solve it. I don’t know how you’re intended to solve that one.
Frankly, a lot of the difficulty just came from how the game functions at a base, non-puzzle level. There’s a lot of spinning things and trying to figure out what camera angle you need to be in and where you need to drag an item for the game to accept it. And sometimes this becomes a puzzle on its own. For instance, in Chapter 1 Door 8, the “solution” to the three valves “puzzle” was actually “just keep turning it until you completely move the rods.” The rods moved so little that I was trying to find a particular configuration the valves were supposed to be in. Oops.
There were a couple interesting bits, though. The one puzzle that had you fitting in pieces with colored circles on them to match an image was different (and reminded me of another puzzle game). The puzzles that have you panning around an image to find clues were neat. The targeting mechanics for the extra levels in Chapter 2 was neat. And I generally just really liked any level that utilized the background in any way (this was mostly Chapter 3). And the art design itself was pretty interesting.
The story is present, I guess. It takes the form of notes you find in each level, and each note is only a sentence long statement from a cat guide. The first chapter was basically telling the life story of a character but I did not vibe with the severity of the tone. The tone of the second was also too severe. Chapter 3 was fine though for being far sparser and more conceptual. Honestly, the devs could’ve just omitted the story and imo it would have improved the experience, especially when they advertise it as a “relaxing” game.
Overall… fine. I was generous and gave it a 6/10, but I could’ve gone lower (and maybe should have). It does not make me willing to play the sequel. In fact, the whole reason why I played this game now was because the sequel is in the January Humble Choice and I wanted to see if it would justify continuing my subscription (the only other game I was interested in there was Against the Storm, and a friend was willing to gift that one to me). I canceled my sub.
I have my eyes on a number of different games I want to play next. For the time being I’m more interested in knocking out some shorter games to establish a bit more consistency in my game time, but this means more narrative and puzzle games. This is an excuse to play that Nekopara catboy game.
Venba
Began: 1/1/2025Completed: 1/1/2025
Playtime (to base completion): 1.5 hours
Purchased on Steam via Humble Choice December 2024
A short narrative game about a immigrant family from India who settled in Canada. The general advertising and the demo focused more on the cooking, but the main focus is really the story. Across the 7 chapters, five I’d call “true” cooking puzzles, one is really a plating sequence, and one chapter doesn’t have cooking at all. I do appreciate that they added recipes and music tracks in a later patch - both because yeah, that food looks tasty, and because the content you get felt a bit sparse otherwise. I wish we actually cooked the plating sequence, since that was half a dozen dishes and we did none of the prep work.
In terms of story, I particularly enjoyed Kavin/Kevin’s perspective. The whole “rejection -> guilt -> reexploration” narrative is just something that feels really personal. This kind of cultural struggle, alienation, and rejection tends to get overlooked when portraying experiences of diaspora, and the game even alludes to that, with Kavin’s coworker wanting fully positive and accepted cultural diversity in the scene they were working on. And I mean, it’s really nice that there’s even enough people to provide those sorts of positive representations, and enough conscientiousness for that to be desired at all. And if I had to choose one kind of representation, of course I’d choose the positive version. But this sort of complicated, messy relationship with identity, and having to grapple with that in a society that has become more accepting than how I was as a child, resonated a lot with me.
Also, the way the game handled Tamil in both perspectives was also really neat! With Venba’s perspective, you had different colored text when they spoke in Tamil vs. English, and there were also “splotched” text boxes from Kavin when he used more complicated English words. And with Kavin’s perspective, I really, really appreciated how the cookbook appears in Tamil and Kavin has to translate it line by line and makes mistakes along the way. I liked that we revisited Venba’s restored cookbook at all. It was just a really sweet moment to see her work, and for Kavin to continue it too.
The ability to scroll through the text messages in a couple sequences was also something I appreciate from a game design perspective. This kind of flavor texts with ambient narratives is something unique to video games and other interactive mediums, and would’ve been omitted or heavily truncated in other mediums simply because it would take up precious space.
Overall, I enjoyed it! I wish there were more gameplay aspects, but the story (and art, and music) were great. Probably not going for 100% achievements, since getting the remaining achievements involves going through the chapters again and there’s no way to skip directly to the food portion.
Doors - Paradox
Began: 1/7/2025Completed: 1/9/2025
Playtime (100%): 5.7 hours
Received for free via Epic Games Store
An escape room puzzle game. The game consists of three chapters, with about 40 levels total. Each level has two gems (blue and red) plus a story note, and if you collect all the gems of each particular color in a chapter you unlock an extra level.
I did not particularly love the puzzles. They range from incredibly easy to frustratingly glitchy to things that weren’t even intended to be puzzles but are just obtuse because of the way the game works. Thankfully, there is a free “skip puzzle” button, and admittedly I did use it a couple times. A couple puzzles that I otherwise knew how to solve were too glitchy to complete; one of them straight up did not respond. I almost used the button for a physics-based puzzle but then the physics glitched out and let me solve it. I don’t know how you’re intended to solve that one.
Frankly, a lot of the difficulty just came from how the game functions at a base, non-puzzle level. There’s a lot of spinning things and trying to figure out what camera angle you need to be in and where you need to drag an item for the game to accept it. And sometimes this becomes a puzzle on its own. For instance, in Chapter 1 Door 8, the “solution” to the three valves “puzzle” was actually “just keep turning it until you completely move the rods.” The rods moved so little that I was trying to find a particular configuration the valves were supposed to be in. Oops.
There were a couple interesting bits, though. The one puzzle that had you fitting in pieces with colored circles on them to match an image was different (and reminded me of another puzzle game). The puzzles that have you panning around an image to find clues were neat. The targeting mechanics for the extra levels in Chapter 2 was neat. And I generally just really liked any level that utilized the background in any way (this was mostly Chapter 3). And the art design itself was pretty interesting.
The story is present, I guess. It takes the form of notes you find in each level, and each note is only a sentence long statement from a cat guide. The first chapter was basically telling the life story of a character but I did not vibe with the severity of the tone. The tone of the second was also too severe. Chapter 3 was fine though for being far sparser and more conceptual. Honestly, the devs could’ve just omitted the story and imo it would have improved the experience, especially when they advertise it as a “relaxing” game.
Overall… fine. I was generous and gave it a 6/10, but I could’ve gone lower (and maybe should have). It does not make me willing to play the sequel. In fact, the whole reason why I played this game now was because the sequel is in the January Humble Choice and I wanted to see if it would justify continuing my subscription (the only other game I was interested in there was Against the Storm, and a friend was willing to gift that one to me). I canceled my sub.
I have my eyes on a number of different games I want to play next. For the time being I’m more interested in knocking out some shorter games to establish a bit more consistency in my game time, but this means more narrative and puzzle games. This is an excuse to play that Nekopara catboy game.
