Valiant Hearts: The Great War
Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a puzzle/adventure game that follows the story-line inspired from World War 1 letters. The game follows four different heroes within the war and allows you to play as them. Depending on where you are in the story, you can either be introduced to a possible character you’re going to play while playing another character or you are randomly loading into a character that you’re being introduced to for the first time.
As you continue to play each character, you learn more and more about the war and what they’re going through by the cut-scenes that show the character writing letters to their families.
To give a little background: The game is set in 1914 which is around the time where Germany and France were at war. You learn quite early in the game that Emile is drafted into the Germany army while his father-in-law, Karl, was drafted into the French army where his daughter, Anna was left at home with her and Emile’s child. As said before, you learn about the characters as you proceed through the story.
Each character that you’re playing has a specialized trait which includes a shovel, shears, and being able to treat patients. I don’t want to tell you who does what because I rather you experience and learn for yourself.
I personally don’t want to get too much into the story as this is a fantastic game, even from the few hours I’ve played it, to get sucked in.
Valiant Hearts is played as a 2-dimensional storyboard in which you can only go left, right, up or down (in certain scenarios such as climbing ladders, climbing over boxes, etc). Depending on the platform you’re playing on (I played mine on steam without connecting a controller), I utilized keys on my keyboard which included the space bar, arrow keys, left shift, the D key, left alt, and F1 for hints. Simplistic keys and they even have a mini tutorial on the keys being used as the story in being told in the beginning.
Each section that you get to in the game will utilize all or some keys. That includes avoiding gunfire, being stealthy, gathering and collecting objects, and car chases.
I appreciate the soundtrack of this game — that is all.
The game has little dialogue meaning the only time you hear any human voices is when the narrator is telling the story (I played with subtitles on, as well). Any time you hear two of the characters talking, it sounds like gibberish and they talk through pictures you see on the screen.
When you switch scenes, switching to another character, or travelling (as the map above shows), you’re introduced to the date, the year and where you’re located. It’s a simplistic detail, but it makes following the story easier and it’s something I enjoyed as I was playing.
Other details that I thought were a fantastic addition to the game was that there were real life World War 1 facts that followed the story line. I’m a big history buff, but I never really followed WW1 since most of my interest laid within the events that happened in World War 2 so learning these facts had me even more interested in the story the game offered.
They even had certain collectibles throughout that had facts attached to how each item was used during war. Those little details made me enjoy the game even more.
The artwork in the game was very cartoon-ish (to me, at least) but I thought it added some relief from the dark story line. The dark colors of each character and even the environment still held a gloomy feeling throughout, but the artwork itself allowed me to have some light-hearted feelings as I was playing.
As story-driven as this game was, I can really only say I appreciated all the big details as well as all the small ones. I found myself appreciating the game as I kept learning about WW1 as well as learning through the letters the characters wrote and even through the characters themselves. I think you’ll have more of an appreciation for the game when you play it yourself rather than reading about it (but, I hope I did the game some justice through my post).
