Valiant Hearts: The Great War – Piecing Together Lives Torn Apart

Valiant Hearts isn’t a game about the waging of the First World War, but is rather a game about the effects that it had, as the conflict ravaged Europe during the early 20th Century. Much like the zombie apocalypse is best used as a backdrop to some powerful and meaningful character studies, Valiant Hearts is using this setting to weave together stories of love, revenge and compassion.

In doing so, it blends several different storytelling methods, with an overall narrator lending a documentary feel to the opening introduction, but quickly giving way to non-verbal forms as it introduces the first handful of characters. It quite poignantly depicts the way that the hasty nationalistic divides at the outbreak of war tore families apart, as German citizens are ejected from French territories and Karl is separated from his wife and child, ending up in the German army.

It’s a powerful opening and introduction to some of the key characters, but soon gives way to the more buoyantly patriotic and optimistic basic training for the French Army, as Emile, Karl’s father in law, is conscripted.

Rather than the action oriented gameplay that you might expect from a game set during wartime, Valiant Hearts serves up much less violent gameplay against this backdrop, with a mixture of puzzling and platforming. At times you will have a grenade to throw, but primarily as a means of destroying a barricade or scaring off enemy troops, other times you will be running headlong into battle, dodging incoming shells and machine gun fire, but much of the gameplay is also dedicated to solving puzzles.

These are often presented by way of pictograms popping up in speech bubbles, as a gruffly mumbled demand from another character is represented on screen by an easy to understand objective. Then there are more complex puzzles which see you interacting with the environment and using items in order to progress.

The adventuring gameplay mechanics are fairly light, on the whole, with each character only able to carry a single item and puzzles that were fairly well contained. However, should you get stuck, there is a quite well-considered hints system that offers up a few clues to your current puzzle, but does so on a timer. It can certainly come in handy, but there were other moments in my time with the game that it actually served to make me more determined to figure out what I needed to do on my own.

While hunting for that item that you need, I often stumbled across small collectibles, tying back into the historical setting. Each new location that you visit sees a wealth of information about the realities behind this fiction, grounding the events you see on screen and bringing many details into a historical context.

As the story unfolds, it sends you to play as a variety of other characters. From Emile, the French farmer turned soldier to Freddie, an African American who signs up to the French Foreign Legion to seek revenge, or Anna, a vet turned medic on the front lines, and more beyond the scope of my time with the game.

Each has their own story to tell and their own motivations that see their paths cross as the game unfolds. They also provide a pleasing but subtle contrast to the gameplay mechanics, with Anna’s focus on healing the wounded taking the form of a small rhythm action game standing in contrast to Emile’s budding relationship with the quite simply adorable and utterly loveable dog named Walt, who will fetch or dig up items, also alerting you to dangers.

They’re all brought to life by a comic-inspired art style, that leans heavily on the abilities of the UbiArt Framework engine, giving another excellent example of its flexibility in working with the bare drawings of the artists. It helps to lighten the mood as you sees caricatured soldiers charge into battle as frames cut into the corners of the screen to show the other side readying their machine guns and cannons.

The contrasts as the cast of characters show you so many views of the war are only emphasises by the music. From a spot of Dvorak to the French national anthem or an oom-pah band, the music is fantastic throughout. It mixed well known pieces with original compositions effortlessly from scene to scene, always evocative and in the style of the music of the era. A spirited rendition of the can-can as you dodge upcoming traffic with French soldiers clinging onto the sides of a taxi makes way for something far more evocative when you reach the already desolate wasteland that is the front line.

Alongside its fellow UbiArt releases, Valiant Hearts is another sign of a Ubisoft that isn’t just content to bring you yearly releases of Assassin’s Creed or Watch Dogs. Yes, it attacks the triple-A market with titles developed by hundreds of people, but it’s also willing to cater to a different market and reward its developers with the creation of smaller teams with the freedom to create smaller and more personal titles. It’s a move that I’d like to see continue long into the future.