A First Look At Valiant Hearts: The Great War

World War 2 gets all of the fame and glorification when it comes to video games. The Great War’s trench warfare is a particularly tricky period to adapt, given how static it so often was, and the lack of a good vs. evil narrative.

However, it’s also a period which is quite close to the small team of developers behind Valiant Hearts, and snippets of their own family histories are buried deep into the game, quite literally.

The game’s story follows five characters from all sides of the war on the Western Front, as they struggle to survive from the very first days of the war, right to the very last. It starts with Emile, a French farmer, who enlists for the war and is captured on the very first day of combat.

As a prisoner of war, he’s shackled and soon put to work. The introductory section sees him ordered by a bunch of rowdy caricatured German officers to fetch them some food. There’s no actual dialogue, though, and information is instead relayed to you though animated icons in speech bubbles.

So Emile shuffles off to the kitchen, of sorts, and the early form of puzzle solving is revealed, with a quite simplistic combination of fire, water and sausages. It’s when Emile is delivering this hearty meal to the Germans that everything kicks off.

Each drag of the cauldron triggers a new comic-book styled vignette of cannons loading. It’s the 10th of March, 1915, and the British are using massed artillery fire for the first time, churning through almost a third of their available ammunition to support the advances over the first day. It gained a little over a mile of territory.

Emile is lucky enough to hide, and is eventually pulled from the rubble by the game’s sixth character, a dog currently nicknamed Walt, who will follow the whole story through the game. This brings in the new dynamic of being able to send him off to fetch things, call him to you and play catch, or just pet him for being a faithful friend – thanks to the DualShock 4’s touchpad.

As Emile and Walt move through the level, this starts to play into some of the puzzle solving, and they can start to get a little more complex, before reaching the end of the demo section, to the backdrop of the ongoing fighting.

All of the artwork in the game is being handled by one man, Paul Tumelaire, who has drawn every single object from historical reference photos and objects. From photos of steam trains, or drivable taxis which were used to ferry troops to the front line, down to the dog tags of one of the producer’s great grandfather, who fought in the war.

It’s quite a feat, but because this game is using Ubi Art, alongside Rayman Legends and Child of Light, it has made it a manageable task for this small team to create the game; there are just 14 people at Ubisoft Montpellier creating this.

It takes on a much more comic-book styling, compared to the other games on Ubi Art. There are more block colours, and less of the vibrancy of Legends, or the watercolours of Child of Light, but it works well to depict the action.

The game’s story structure isn’t quite worked out yet, but what is known is that it will hop from Emile to the other characters, and that their paths will cross in some ways. It could be that Emile will at some point meet George, the British pilot and observer, or Freddie, based off Corporal Freddie Stowers, an African-American soldier as part of the “Harlem Hellfighters” 369th Infantry who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

His slice of the game sees this almost action hero-like charge up to the front line, as fighting takes place in the area surrounding Le Mans. With bolt cutters in tow, he can cut through the barbed wire set to break through to the many bridges crossing the river.

Here he has to blow the bridge to halt the German advance, and we get to see a little more puzzling, as you have to use a grenade to free a ladder, to pass over the top of a machine gun emplacement. A little bit of stealthy distraction lets him get the best of a soldier, and get at the bridge’s foundations, to blow them to smithereens.

This was just a brief glimpse at quite an intriguing title. It’s bold, trying to tackle such a murky period in history, and yet not have it be a particularly action oriented game but rather a story-based 2D puzzle adventure is quite unique. Taking five characters and telling each of their stories as they interweave and cross over will also be an interesting blend, but it’s a delight to see such a project come to fruition from a tiny team in the South of France.