The Therapist Gamer

Valiant Hearts: The Great War

Valiant Hearts plays sort of like those old "point and click" adventure games like Monkey Island, but it's far more story driven and the puzzling aspects are actually pretty straightforward.  I thought this was nice because nothing takes me out of a game like getting stuck on a part for two days. You play as a few different characters during World War I (at the time it was called The Great War).  Every twenty or thirty minutes the story progresses to the point where you play as another character, and all of their stories interlace with one another.

 

The game begins towards the start of the war.  A frenchman has a daughter who is married to a German, and the German is forced to leave home and fight in the war while the woman's father is forced to fight against him. You also play as an American soldier whose family was killed and who has come to fight for the Allies before the United States formally entered the war; his part feels a bit hamfisted, almost as if his part was included just to appeal to the American audience.  You also play as a woman with a medical background who roams the cities and battlefields trying to help out where she can.  

 

Many of the situations presented in the game are taken from actual events, and throughout the game you find collectibles that provide some context for what occurred in real life.  More than once I cried while playing - not really because of the game itself, but because it prompted me to think about what happened during the war to actual people.  So much of it was just so sad.  For example, mustard gas was dropped on cities and killed thousands of civilians, including children.  At one point you find a urine-soaked handkerchief, which seems like a gross thing to include in a serious game.  The game provides some context for the hankie, explaining that people discovered that you would not die from the gas if you peed on a cloth and then breathed through it.  Imagining children being exposed to these types of situations as their homes are blown up was sobering.  It's rare to find a game that treats the topic of war so carefully and with such meaning. At other points in the game you are forced to do things with which you disagree, but such is the life of a soldier - especially during World War I.  I think Valiant Hearts really shows how video games can be used to convey messages that are not possible through other mediums.

 

I haven't really written much here, and that's partly because it's somewhat of a difficult game to describe.  Suffice it to say that I thought this was one of the better games I've played and that it treats its subject material with great respect.