Valiant Hearts is the rare game that combines engaging gameplay with a compelling narrative and a strongly anti-war message. I highly encourage readers to give it a try, even if you’re not usually interested in gaming. It’s available for all the major platforms, some of which are now offering the first chapter free, so if you want, you can try it out before buying the full version.
What sets this game apart is the way it brings the horrors of the First World War to life (or maybe, “to death”) through a touching story about hope in the midst of unimaginable destruction. To that end, it tends to steer away from nationalist moralizing in favor of stressing the war’s human cost on both sides. Most importantly, unlike the endless stream of military shooters saturating the gaming market, Valiant Hearts doesn’t revel in violence: it abhors it.
The story follows a group of family and friends whose lives are shattered by the conflict, and who try, seemingly in vain, to put the pieces back together. Rather than “winning” the war, these characters simply try to survive it.
In fact, although the protagonists are constantly thrust into battle, they seldom do much fighting. Instead, the gameplay focuses on the struggle to escape the conflict and reunite with family. Through that struggle, it provides a window into the lives of the human beings forced to fight this most inhuman of wars.
Downplaying the role of military action also allows the narrative to turn gaming conventions on their heads. For example, instead of deploying an increasingly lethal arsenal of high-tech weaponry to destroy the enemy, you are equipped with soup ladles, shovels, and bricks, which are used, not to kill, but to help others. You save the lives of people who are supposedly your enemies; dodge shells and hide from gas attacks; wash dirty socks and try to stave off the misery of the trenches.
However, although the anti-war message is appealing, it’s the art design that truly drives the experience (some samples of the artwork are available here). The hand-drawn animations are genuinely beautiful, and somehow manage to capture the bloody, grimy despair of the war without trivializing it. As one reviewer puts it,
Playing it really feels like watching a wonderful piece of animation… Of course, it shines… when asked to depict the calm of rural France, but it’s equally effective when tackling much more difficult environments. The trenches and front lines of the war, in particular, resemble scenes from Hell, with thick smoke weighing down from above and piles of corpses providing cover. Importantly, the cartoon style never conceals the horror of what is taking place.
The game also shows brilliantly how simple animations can be used to great emotional effect. For instance, while many of the soldiers are drawn with prominent facial features like moustaches and beards, the game’s artists conceal their eyes beneath hair or helmets. The result is that we come to know the characters through their actions, not their faces, which can be difficult to tell apart. This itself is a tragic comment on war: to an enemy machine gun, all faces are the same.
Similarly, while there is spoken dialogue in the game, the words are muffled and indistinct, and have to be understood by inflection and context. This hints at the way conflict dulls the senses and dehumanizes individuals, robbing them of faces and voices in order to transform them into cannon fodder.
I won’t ruin the ending of the story, but I will say it makes heartbreaking use of the player’s control to deliver a final point about who the real enemies are in the war. The effect of this final chapter is infinitely more powerful than the pointless, lazy, “press the X button to feel emotion” prompts found in games like Call of Duty.
In addition to the grim realities, I should note that there are also moments of levity in the story when the tone changes drastically. Some critics consider these tonal shifts as failings, but for me, they only enhanced the effect of the more serious moments by adding an additional layer of humanity to the characters (I’d have loved to see something on the Christmas truce, but sadly, it isn’t mentioned).
Valiant Hearts is about family, friendship, and hope, and how war tears each of these apart. It should be added to a growing list of artistic works that use animation to make powerful statements about the horrors of war. Carolyn Petit captures the game’s message perfectly: “’great’ is just about the last thing any war should be called.”
