Pressure cooker

With so many eyes on Venba, Abhi is feeling the weight of expectation. “Now there’s a lot of responsibilities,” the designer says, explaining how, with a very finite amount of recipes and dishes to recreate in Venba, there’s inevitably going to be debate over the inclusion of certain foods. “I can guarantee you this game will come out and almost every Tamil person who plays it will contact me and say, ‘How can you not include this dish?’” Abhi says, pointing to this as the single biggest challenge when developing a game about Indian cuisine and heritage. He’s made his peace with it, though, and is confident the recipes he’s chosen are the best ones to represent his homeland and family cooking.