Valiant Hearts: The Birth of the Prestige Game

What to say about Valiant Hearts: The Great War?

It's a good game, to be sure. It manages to deftly mix moments of humor, terror, and nail-biting tension in a narrative built around a strong emotional core, buoyed by frequent "aha" moments thanks to the numerous puzzles that form the bulk of gameplay. It features some overwrought narration and an insistence on educating the player that at times can be grating. The art style is beautiful, and by adopting this style the player isn't exposed to brutal, photorealistic gore in a manner that might desensitize them to the horrific violence that marked World War I - not to mention it makes the game much more accessible.

Overall, I enjoyed my experience with the game. But throughout my playthrough I was struck by a familiar sensation. It took me a while to put my finger on it. Then it hit me.

Valiant Hearts is the video game equivalent of Lincoln. Or War Horse. Or any other classic "prestige picture" you'd care to name. Valiant Hearts is a game with a very distinct purpose that it does not shy away from, released the week of the first world war's centennial and featuring throughout facts and archival photos contributed by historical foundations.

What's unique about this game, however, and why I'm writing this post at all, is that Valiant Hearts is pretty much the only game of its type. Released by a large distributor (Ubisoft) and with a substantial marketing push behind it, it isn't quite at the scale of a huge release like Lincoln, but it's bigger than most other similar efforts, and that sort of movie is most certainly the template it draws from in constructing its story. And this just so happens to be the rare case where a game's attempt to copy cinema has been to the work's advantage. The conventional wisdom for years has been that World War I games would be impossible to make and sell because there's no way you could make them in a way that might resemble their hugely successful predecessors - namely, World War II games. A World War I shooter would consist of sitting in a muddy trench for a few days, then a whistle blows, you climb a ladder, and get shot and die.

And to be sure Valiant Hearts doesn't present a perfectly accurate view of the war. The presence of a bratwurst-chomping, superweapon producing German antagonist is cause for a groan or two (or three). But it's not trying to provide a totally realistic picture of World War I. It's trying to connect players emotionally with events one hundred years distant, and in that respect it succeeds far more often than it fails. Nowhere is this more evident than the sections where the player controls Anna, a Belgian medic. I found these some of the most compelling gameplay sequences I'd experienced in recent memory, to the point where I kind of want someone to make a full fledged war game that puts the player in the role of a non-combatant medic, whose goal is just to save as many lives as possible.

And that's why this game is so important. Not just because it bothered to tackle a historical subject most other video games wouldn't dare to, but because it offers a sort of blueprint for how other games might approach difficult topics or events. It shows the value games can bring to representations of difficult or horrifying or tragic historical scenarios by eschewing the familiar combat that marks so many AAA titles, focusing instead on generating empathy in the player. With any luck, in thirty years time we'll see a game about World War II where the player isn't meant to mow down every German soldier he sees.