Valiant Hearts: The Great War

In the game, speech bubbles replace dialogue when characters are conversing with each other.

Valiant Hearts is a side-scrolling, puzzle-based, adventure video game which takes place during World War I. Players assume the role of four characters: Frenchman Emile, his German son-in-law Karl, American soldier Freddie, and Belgian nurse Anna.[2][3]

The game comprises four chapters split into several sections. Each section requires the player to clear an objective to progress through the story.[4] Most of these involve solving puzzles by obtaining certain items needed for the situation.[2] Other sections include wartime segments requiring the player to survive heavy gunfire, stealth sections where the player must avoid being detected by enemies,[5] and rhythmic car chase sections set to classic songs.[6] Each character can interact with objects, perform a melee attack to knock out guards or smash through debris, and throw projectiles.[2] There are also some traits unique to each character.[7] Emile has a shovel which lets him dig through soft ground, Freddie can cut through barbed wire, and Anna can treat patients for injuries, which requires the player to time button presses.[3]

Players can issue various commands to a dog named Walt, who is able to squeeze into small areas, hold on to and fetch certain items, activate switches, and move around without being suspected by the enemy.[3][8] The game features optional collectible items hidden in each segment, facts about the war that are unlocked as the game progresses,[3] and a hint system the player can use if they are stuck on a section after a certain amount of time.[2]

The story begins in the year 1914. The Austro-Hungarian Empire declares war on Serbia following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In defense of Serbia, Russia declares war on Austria-Hungary, and Austria's ally Germany declares war on Russia in response. Anticipating war, France (who is allied with Russia) begins deporting German citizens. Karl, one of the deported Germans, is separated from his wife Marie and their son Victor, and drafted into the German army. Likewise, Marie's father and Karl's father-in-law Emile is drafted into the French army. After completing his training, Emile is thrown into combat during the Battle of the Frontiers. His unit is wiped out, and he is wounded, captured, and forced to cook for the Germans. His captor is Baron Von Dorf, who uses many advanced weapons like chlorine gas and zeppelins to defeat his foes. Karl recognizes Emile while serving under Von Dorf, but the Allies attack Von Dorf's camp and Karl is forced to flee. After he is rescued from the rubble by Walt, a German Army medical dog, Emile escapes in the confusion and meets Freddie, an American who volunteered to join the French army after his wife was killed in a German bombing raid led by Von Dorf.

Freddie and Emile meet Anna, a Belgian veterinary student who doubles as a battlefield nurse. She is tracking Von Dorf since he is forcing her father to develop advanced war machines. The three chase Von Dorf's zeppelin from Ypres to Reims. When it crashes, Von Dorf escapes with Anna's father in a biplane. Karl survives the crash and is captured and taken as a prisoner of war. Anna accompanies Karl to the prison to make sure he recovers from his wounds.

Emile and Freddie continue their pursuit to exact revenge on Von Dorf and rescue Anna's father. They assault Fort Douaumont at Verdun where Von Dorf is hiding and capture his newest war machine, a large armoured tank. Although they rescue Anna's father, Von Dorf escapes again. While Emile is separated, Freddie continues his pursuit and finally corners Von Dorf during the Battle of the Somme, defeating him in a fist fight atop his ruined tank. Despite his desire for revenge, Freddie realizes he will not gain anything by killing Von Dorf and spares his life. For his repeated failures, Von Dorf is demoted and sent away from the front lines, a fate worse than death for the status-obsessed man.

Meanwhile, in a French prisoner of war camp, Karl learns his son is ill. Determined to reunite with his family, Karl escapes the camp. Unbeknown to this, Emile believes he was killed while trying to escape. Karl encounters Anna, who helps drive him back to his farm at occupied Saint-Mihiel, but they are both captured by the Germans. Karl escapes when the Allies stage another assault that reaches his farm. He discovers it has been shelled with chlorine gas. Karl saves Marie's life by giving her his gas mask, but he succumbs to the gas. Anna arrives and saves Karl's life. When he recovers, Karl is finally reunited with his wife and son after three years of war and exile.

Back on the front lines, Emile is forced into the bloody and suicidal Nivelle offensive. As his commanding officer constantly forces his troops into the line of fire and to their deaths, Emile finally reaches his breaking point and strikes the officer with his shovel, inadvertently killing him. He is court-martialed and sentenced to death by firing squad despite the protests of other soldiers. As he is dragged to his execution, Freddie and the survivors of the doomed offensive salute him for his heroism. In his final letter to Marie, Emile expresses his hatred of war, his grief at Karl's apparent death and his inability to save his son in law, and hopes that she and her family can find happiness. Emile is executed, and some time later, Karl and his family (with the newly adopted Walt in tow) visit his grave to mourn him. The story ends in 1917 when the United States officially enters the war and sends its army to Europe to fight on the Western Front. The final message states that "Even though their bodies have long since returned to dust, their sacrifice still lives on. We must strive to cherish their memory and never forget..."

Artist Paul Tumelaire began working on Valiant Hearts: The Great War as a solo project in 2011. Additional team members from Ubisoft Montpellier, including directors Yoan Fanise and Simon Chocquet-Bottani, joined to work on the gameplay and the story a half-year later. As 2014 was the centenary of World War I, the team wanted to create a game grounded in history. The title was intended to help players remember the war and to suggest the game is also about love.[9] According to the team, the incidents from World War I "touched" them because their great-grandparents had been involved in the war.[10]

Initially, the developers put equal emphasis on both the storyline and its gameplay. However, the gameplay became secondary to the story. The team believed that portraying World War I as a shooter would have made it too violent,[9] and the game would have needed a narrative with a villain and had to depict one of the belligerents as evil. Instead, the team tried to create a game about the trials and tribulations of both sides during the war,[11] showing how individuals lived their lives and struggled to survive. The game does not allow the characters to be actively killed by other in-game characters; the developers hoped to show the human side of the war[12] and feared that allowing players to kill would muddle the message they wanted to convey.[13] The game introduces four characters, and the story switches between them. This enabled the team to create an emotional story with better pacing and ensure that each story beat ends with a cliffhanger.[13] While the story began with some light-hearted moments, the tone of the story became progressively darker and solemn as the war wages on.[14]

The team did not want players to feel overpowered and designed the title as a slow-paced puzzle video game which does not involve much violence. Gameplay mechanics are simple so the game is accessible, but the team introduced different contexts for the use of the gameplay mechanics to ensure they would not become stale.[13] The walking pace of characters was slow to illustrate they are ordinary human beings. According to the team, the presence of these slow puzzle-solving segments helped make the rare action sequences more powerful. As none of the creative leads had experience working on a puzzle game, the team looked at design documents from old LucasArts adventure games for inspiration. They were also inspired by titles including The Cave, Machinarium, and Limbo.[10]

The team traveled to the trenches in France to ensure their depiction in the game is accurate.

To ensure the game was historically accurate, the development team listened to first-hand accounts of the war from team members' families, read letters written by soldiers, and traveled to the trenches in France. The information and stories they collected were then incorporated into the title as collectibles to let players gain new knowledge about the war.[9][15] Ubisoft also partnered with the producers of the documentary film Apocalypse World War I to incorporate archived materials into the game.[16] However, the game's cast of protagonists is not based on any historical figure as the team did not want to "cross the line between reality and fiction".[10] To create an "immersive soundscape", the audio team inspected archived documents from the French Foreign Legion, and the development team recorded themselves making various screaming sounds.[9]

The game is powered by Ubisoft's UbiArt Framework game engine, which was used previously in smaller Ubisoft titles including Child of Light and Montpellier's own Rayman Legends.[17][18] The team opted to use a cartoonish visual, as they believed that this art style helped them to retain "respect for the people who went through ... [the war] while also making it accessible". Speech bubbles serve as the main way of showing conversations between characters, since they help to convey a complicated story in a simple manner.[19] Another reason for their use was to avoid having to deal with different languages. The game's cutscenes are similar to a comic book, showing the player something happening far away from the characters using comic viewpoints.[10]

Ubisoft officially announced the game on 13 September 2013.[20] The game was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One via digital download on 25 June 2014.[21] An iOS version of the game was released on 4 September 2014.[22] Players who purchased the game before 6 November received a free copy of a digital interactive comic book named Valiant Hearts: Dogs of War, which stars Walt and his sister.[23] The game was released for the Nintendo Switch on 8 November 2018, and for Google Stadia on 14 July 2022.[24][25]

• 11-11: Memories Retold, a video game by the same director commemorating the centennial of the armistice

• Official website