There's a particular type of Indie game that... well, I hesitate to call them "prestige games", like they were eligible for some version of the Video Game Oscars, but in essence those spurred by a noble purpose to educate as well as entertain. Not in the Math Blaster sense, but in the "this is a particular type of folklore or historical event that goes underrepresented, and we wanted to base our game on it to help spread awareness and tell those stories". Valiant Hearts: The Great War was developed and released to roughly coincide with the centennial anniversary of the start of World War I, or the Great War as it was known then before anyone had plans for a sequel. I'm generally mixed when it comes to games based on real wars - you're playing as and killing real people, or at least fictionalized versions thereof, and that never sits right with me - and I'm also mixed about producing a game to, if not celebrate than honor in some way, the START of the one of the worst wars in history as opposed to its END. Whatever. As a French studio, Ubisoft Montpellier has more stake than most in honoring the victims of the First World War - with France being a country that suffered so badly from casualties that it had to sit out the second World War, at least officially - and while the game has an ensemble cast with four distinct playable characters, the heart and soul (if you don't count Walt the dog) is Emile, a middle-aged French farmer called up to serve on the front lines.

The game switches between Emile, a shell-shocked American volunteer out for revenge named Freddie, the Belgian student Anna who finagles her way into the war as a battle nurse in the hope of finding her abducted scientist father, and Emile's German son-in-law Karl who is torn between serving his country and returning to his French wife and infant son. Their paths regularly intersect throughout the first three years of the war, stopping shortly before the Allied push in 1918, and covers every battlefield of note: Verdun, The Somme, Vimy, Ypres and Reims among other locales like a prisoner of war camp and Emile's war-torn farm in St. Mihiel. The gameplay is mostly that of a 2D adventure game in which the player has to solve puzzles to proceed, either by finding the right item to use in the right place or by manipulating switches and pulleys to attain a desired result. Each character also has their own specializations: Emile can dig, Freddie can cut through barbed wire, Anna is able to heal people via a rhythm-based medic mini-game. They're almost always accompanied by a dog who you might say is the true protagonist of the game, as we're almost always following his viewpoint. The dog can get through narrow tunnels, pull levers and collect and carry objects, making him an essential element in many of the puzzles. I was a little skeptical when I saw the cute little pup as a medic assistant dog, but he proves his utility enough times that I can reliably say he serves more of a role than simply laying on some additional cheap pathos as you worry about his ultimate fate.

Other sections of the game include these silly head-on vehicle sections accompanied by public domain classical music like Offenbach's Infernal Galop or Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee - two tunes that you might not recognize by their name but certainly would recognize when heard. They're also the only times when the game affords itself a little levity, which I'm not sure is entirely appropriate given the subject matter but the game would perhaps be too dour without them. The driving sequences rely on a lot of quick reactions and, occasionally, knowing ahead of time when something will suddenly move towards you. Likewise, there's a lot of on-foot sequences where you're dashing forward avoiding bombs by their shadows and machine-gun fire by waiting for pauses as they reload. Some of these sequences feel more arbitrary than others, and death was surprisingly common. Maybe a redundant statement considering the circumstances. Hell, there might be something to be said for how a sudden and unexpected demise is highly verisimilitudinous to the Great War, but that might be giving the developers too much credit.

Honestly, for as much as I respect what this game does and the ways it imaginatively constructs its puzzles and set-pieces, there's more than a few misgivings I had with the game. Most of them involve technical hiccups and bugs, which at least three times prevented me from making any progress until I'd reloaded from the last checkpoint and fixed whatever went wrong. That's a really bad thing when your game relies so much on puzzle solving, because I had no way of knowing if the game had messed up or if I was just missing something. At one point I gave the dog a key item, and then suddenly the dog and I were separated and I could no longer complete the next objective because the dog still had that item in his mouth. Other times items refused to spawn, or the environment wouldn't react appropriately to an action I'd performed. I could forgive one such incident, but there were quite a few of them if you also include glitches that fortunately didn't prevent my way forward. The character animations were jerky also: they each ran around like Scribblenauts characters, overly expressive paper dolls comprised of several limbs and a head and torso, and that buffoonery had something of a detrimental effect to the game's intent of conveying the horrible realities of war. This is almost certainly due to the fact that Valiant Hearts is based on the same UbiArt Framework that was used in the Rayman reboots, where such goofy motions would be far more germane.

I can definitely say I learned a lot more about the first World War from playing Valiant Hearts, between vicariously living those battles, reading up on historical snippets that the game provides for each of its missions, and perusing the descriptions of various collectible keepsakes found from often well-hidden locations. As an educational jeremiad to the Great War, it does its job adroitly. As a video game that's fun to play, it's a little more uneven.

Rating: 3 out of 5.