Valiant Hearts is the most respectful war game, ever.

Valiant Hearts is the only game I’ve played that respectfully encapsulates war. It delivers a narrative that’s jam packed with themes of personal hardship and sacrifice while giving the player enough historical context. It represents multiple viewpoints of World War I and never really paints any side as bad. This game isn’t about fighting in combat or the greater politics, but instead the human elements take center stage.

The game’s cartoony approach to the narrative and art never really detract from the overall tone. There are plenty of light hearted scenes, humor, and even a cute dog companion. However, unlike games like the new Wolfenstein that can’t manage multiple tones, Valiant Hearts successfully delivers the grim realities of the war.

While certain scenes of brutality such as using massive piles of corpses as cover from machine gun fire can set a distracting juxtaposition for some folks, it never hindered my experience. I would argue that this juxtaposition of art and narrative serves the purpose of stealthily exposing the player to the brutality of the war in a comfortable setting. The game never downplays any grim reality.

Valiant Hearts does a good job of entertaining the player but takes time to show the player how fucked up the situation they’re in really is. The narrative constantly reminds the player of the enormous death toll and the futility of the war. The macabre environment and depressing atmosphere leads to a constant sense of dread. However, that constant dread is alleviated by the friendly art style. The art allows the commentary on the war to be communicated without it being a heavy handed drag.

One of the most impressive parts of the game is the historical context. Each section of the game utilizes one of the horrifying innovations of death as a gameplay mechanic or obstacle. This includes using a tank to move through a battlefield, cutting through barbed wire, or using a gas mask to survive deadly chemical weapons. These real world obstacles translate as game mechanics well, but the expertise lays with how the developer communicates why these innovations were deadly and the hurdles soldiers had to go through to overcome them. You will learn why gas attacks were so deadly and the game will show you how barbed wire was one of the deadliest new tools of war.

The human elements are executed with such respect and gentleness that it makes them stand apart from other interpretations of war. One of the main characters is a soldier drafted into the German army, forced away from his wife and newborn son. This son grows up without a father and the wife is left without any information on whether her husband is alive or not. Another character is a civilian nurse travels from Paris to the frontline healing horses, Germans, and French. She doesn’t care about the war or the uniforms, but wants to do her part in taking care of the sick and injured regardless of creed.

That’s only two examples of a surprisingly large cast. The story does a good job at showcasing the soldiers efforts in the war on different sides and the efforts of women and civilians.

Valiant Hearts is also sure to show the player the gruesome conditions of trench warfare. It gives us a glimpse into the minds of the soldiers whether this be how female nurses played a massive role in the recovery and moral of the injured men and how an Infantryman would trade valuables for dry socks. It also shows the player that disease and simple shrapnel wounds killed more soldiers than bayonets or bullets.

It’s this attention to detail and historical care that makes the game credible and a decent tool to teach people about a war often glossed over in history classes despite it taking the lives of over 40 million people. One historical element like the invention of Dog Tags is explained and even used as a plot point.

What the most beautiful thing about Valiant Hearts is that its human elements are not married to WWI. Most of the things it teaches about the mindset of soldiers and the strain combat are probably applicable to all wars. With the game never actually handing you a gun, it illustrates that war is more complicated than shooting people with different uniforms and that those different uniforms are also worn by humans that are in the same situation as "the good guys".

Note: My job at Iron Galaxy is going well. I totally have a new level of appreciation for games that are good and come out. Because holy shit there's a lot that go into games. Especially spreadsheets. Soo many spreadsheets.

@stevenbeynon

Hm. It sounds brilliant.

Gotta get on that, I don't know why I keep putting it off.

Don't let those spreadsheets win! Hope you're enjoying the city, but keep in mind that it's not always this beautiful out.

Yeah it's pretty good. The art direction really does do well to avoid ham-fistedly undermining it's theme and setting but there's still quite a bit of superfluous gamey nonsense. It kind of gets away with a lot by having an art style so departed from reality, and what we're used to seeing. I also disagree with your review of Wolfenstein. It never tried to say anything meaningful and instead successfully juggles pulpy sci fi nazi killing fun with a rather po faced thriller exterior that I think a lot of people really bought in to. I found it both engaging and entertaining.

Well if I wasn't sold on the game before, I am now.

Glad to hear your new gig is going well @epicsteve !

Completely agree.

It was borderline infuriating to watch self-satisfied pricks run it down in the quick look because 'having an art style and puzzle gameplay elements is offensive to WW1 vets'. Meanwhile the developers are taking time to explain things like facial disfigurement and the awful effects of chlorine gas. They talk about the small aspects that go in to living in a warzone, the tools that soldiers used to survive, the tools they created to solve problems that no one in high command could have imagined, they talk about the carnage, the suffering, and what it took to go on. When I read the little blurb on facial disfigurement, I was overcome with thinking of the post-war, and this sudden influx of scars, missing appendages, missing limbs, facial disfigurements in regular society. An entire generation of boys (and girls) who would grow up physically ravaged by this event, to such a degree that seeing a young man missing an eye would be almost common in comparison to today.

I'm a Canadian and no historically recorded wars have been waged on the plains outside of my city. I don't get to have a first hand look at the effects of World Wars when I go for a drive out of town. As much as empathy and research is non-national, I don't think you might find a game as artfully crafted as Valiant Hearts from a developer who is not based in France or Germany.

I mean if you think about how more than 10% of the male French population died, I'd imagine a lot more were disfigured or crippled for awhile.

Good read, thanks for writing that. Also holy shit I had no idea you got a job at Steel Nebula, congratulations! Be sure to remind Ron Galaxy often of how terrible he is.

Just finished the game thanks to Playstation Plus and I agree and disagree. Let me get out of the way that I think it was a good experience, and a fun game, but I can't think of a more tonally dissonant entertainment product I've played in a while. On the one hand I'm reading what amount to miniature encyclopedia entries on a variety of aspects of the war; all of these are informative enough to get their point across in a game the developers don't expect to take very long, and many of them even had me noting them for a wikipedia search after I'd set the game down. And the core of the story, at least where it begins and where it ends, is very much in line with what World War I was.

...And then on the other hand, you have the American wearing nothing more than a vest and pants for the entire game slamming his Mark I tank into Baron Von Dorf's tank in a head on collision down a hill, then leaping out to rip his adversary atop the two tanks for a Solid Snake vs. Liquid Snake QTE. Or you have pretty much all the conceits of the puzzles and 'boss fights', like a dog that no one pays any mind to (I had forgotten the narrative excuse for why throughout the middle of the game, but once I remembered I still had to suspend disbelief over a dog running around unsupervised on a military base). Or the three vertical scrolling vehicle missions set to caper tunes.

Again, it's a fun game, and the way the narrative earns its payoffs (I was watery eyed as I'd expect most players to be, and my heart was racing throughout most of each character's final level) is commendable considering how goofy most of the situations the characters find themselves in are. I get that at the end of the day Ubisoft Montpellier had to deliver a game on top of the story they wanted to tell and it's a fairly novel way to get that part done, I just don't agree that they found the best way to make a puzzle-action game that also satisfies the general tone of their story. They get it right about half the time, but when they get it wrong it's so swing-for-the-fences wrong it's hard to ignore. Fun to play, but hard to keep thoughts like "how would someone actually react to this in the middle of a battlefield on the French countryside?" out of the back of my mind.

I suppose more than anything my point boils down to: take away the hidden items' descriptions, take away the fact pages, and keep just the gameplay, storyline and diary; I think the game loses a considerable amount of its gravitas at that point and feels a little more like a goofy Saturday morning romp that happens to come with a tearjerker at the end, more Toy Story 3 (sorry for lack of a better allusion, it's 4:40AM my time and I need to get to bed) than All Quiet on the Western Front.