Tale of two games: How Venba and Raji try to take India to the world

With Venba and its narrative that intricately weaves the challenges of immigrant lives, the allure of Indian cuisine, and a nostalgic longing for the possibilities of the 80s and 90s, its creators - Visai Games venture into a similar realm.

Hyderabad: Media content often is representative of the cultures it is created in and for the longest time Indian films (Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam) have often carried an additional burden apart from narrating the stories their makers desire, they have, (to paraphrase Arundhati Roy), “served as interpreters of India and its many cultures to the West.”

With Venba and its narrative that intricately weaves the challenges of immigrant lives, the allure of Indian cuisine, and a nostalgic longing for the possibilities of the 80s and 90s, its creators – Visai Games venture into a similar realm.

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Much like Indian films, Venba presents a game that not only explores the struggles faced by an Indian family in Canada but also offers an interpretation to both a global audience and a segment of India’s population residing in the mainland, who may not have experienced an immigrant life firsthand.

Venba’s success notwithstanding, Indian games have rarely experimented with high quality storytelling. Most game makers (Indian and global) have however realized the potential of the country’s large player base and have decided to tap into mythology and folk lore to find inspiration for new games. This move though has often led to the making of games which are not built from the ground-up but rather are localized iterations of existing popular game formats.

For example, Baahubali: The Game, which was released in 2017, essentially mimicked the mechanics of the popular Clash of Clans, without incorporating any of the distinctive elements that contributed to the film franchise’s popularity.

In recent times, I’ve observed the emergence of multiple such “localized” attempts within the Indian gaming landscape. Yet, comprehending how the creators of these games intend to distinguish themselves within a marketplace teeming with millions of options on the mobile ecosystem has proven to be a challenge.

In contrast, games like Venba and Raji stand apart. While they did garner significant pre-launch attention and popularity (something even FAU-G enjoyed), they were designed to as inherently unique experiences, complete with original worlds, characters, and narratives. Both titular protagonists (Venba and Raji) possessed compelling reasons to engage players and their accomplishments held significance.

If one were to compare the two, Raji from 2020 and Venba from last week in terms of how they tell their stories alone – the evolution of game-based storytelling also comes to the fore. The food-centric Venba allows its players to come to terms with its cultural references on their own rather than rely on constant narrator-based commentary like Raji.

By employing a straightforward text-based dialogue delivery that complemented by a background score, it succeeds in conveying intricate cultural and emotional nuances. At the same time, it also manages to forge a path for games that wish to tell uniquely Indian stories.

Indeed, a significant aspect of playing a game is to fully engage in the reality crafted by its developers. By getting the world to experience dimensions of what it means to be Indian and to understand reality as interpreted by us? This could be a great way to tell our own stories.