The cartoonish approach should soften the blows of war, what with the entire game taking to World War 1 with inky outlines and the sunset colorings of a graphic novel. It's Adventure Game Lite, with communication reduced to a powerful minimum of illustrated word bubbles and spoken gibberish. For you, this means collecting relevant objects, using them to solve a variety of mechanical puzzles (some clichéd) and becoming hopelessly attached to one more important companion: a loyal Doberman Pinscher that will happily fetch whatever you can't. Over the course of several years, these regulars meet, separate, survive bombshells of all sorts and perhaps meet again. You play as both Emile and Karl on either side of the ugly war, as well as Anna, a Belgian-born nurse stationed in Paris, and Freddie, an American who enlists with a personal vengeance at heart. Emile's training with bayonet in hand is presented as a hastened vignette, rushing him from the barracks to the front line in a few screens – and getting your tutorial over with. Soon after, his stout father-in-law, Emile, is marched into the French army. Karl, a German civilian living in France, is torn out of the country, far away from his wife and young son. For every dour moment in Valiant Hearts, for every uphill struggle, there is a moment of warmth, of return, and reunion between old friends.This lilting story, "freely inspired" by the events of World War 1, begins in 1914 just as Germany hollers in Russia's direction. It sends you digging into the trenches of World War 1, but knows that leaving you to wallow in the mud and blood forever does not grant it emotional maturity. I was moved, connecting with a nearly century-old artifact, just as I'd been earlier in the game by a photograph of a seated soldier in helmet and double-breasted gray uniform, his legs splayed, eating something from a dish, gazing at the picture-taker with an expression that told all: profound weariness in the eyes, a slightly sardonic twist to the mouth - perhaps irritation at being photographed - and most of all, a kind of grim resoluteness.Valiant Hearts: The Great War treads surely and lightly through the grimmest of places. The in-game item I'd found was a map of Belgium, carried by Albert Smith, who had fought in the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. I hadn't heard about a lot of this stuff.Īt one point I stumbled on a collectible described as "Valiant Stories Contest Memorabilia." Earlier this year, Ubisoft invited relatives of WWI veterans to submit images and stories of their family memorabilia for a chance to be included in the game.
I've read several books on WWI, most of them focused on the military particulars. If you take the time to rifle through any of that, you'll learn that chlorine gas was heavier than air and tended to stagnate in shell-holes, that giant stethoscope-like devices were used to listen for enemy sappers tunneling underground, that urine-soaked cloths were the only defense against gas prior to gas masks, that the German helmet was called a Pickelhaube and that nevrosthenine injections - a magnesium and potassium cocktail I'd never heard of - were given as energy boosters to weary soldiers. The notion seems as unfathomable today as it would have a century ago. Imagine the populations of London and New York City today wiped off the face of the planet in less than half a decade. Many were disfigured for life, forced to wear prostheses or makeshift tin veneers to cover grave injuries to their faces.
More than 16 million people died over the course of WWI, and another 20 million were wounded. Over the course of two dozen levels, it veers from whimsical to stomach-churning, telling a tragic story that's educational without seeming stodgy or pretentious. Available now for consoles and PC, Valiant Hearts is set between the Battle of Marne in September 1914 and April 1917, just as the United States began to get involved in the fighting. In that light, Ubisoft Montpelier's Valiant Hearts: The Great War is an anomaly, a history-minded side-scrolling game with puzzle elements that looks like the offspring of a concept artist and a pastel cartoonist. Besides dogfighting games like Red Baron, WWI is fairly underrepresented.
World War I might have been called "The Great War," but videogames have given it short shrift.