Join John from Podcasters United as he shares his recent experience with The Valiant Hearts Collection!
And one heckin’ good doggo!
General William Tecumseh Sherman, a Union commander during the American Civil War, issued what I have often considered to be the final and authoritative take on war:
“You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars, and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes burned and in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you: war is Hell.”
We should consider well that this was part of a cautionary commencement speech given by General Sherman to the graduating class of the Michigan Military Academy in 1879. I share this to impress upon my reader that no story about war should be undertaken lightly and for what it’s worth I don’t think that’s the case with Valiant Hearts. Unfortunately, what I found in my playthrough is that while it certainly has a lot of… well… heart, in my opinion it too frequently struggles in both tone and execution.
But the art and music do create a wonderful atmosphere.
As a history nerd and teacher, I was genuinely excited to finally play a game centered around the Great War. As a gamer I can say that titles featuring this period are exceedingly rare as World War II is usually much more commonly adapted and romanticized in the gaming space in your standard shooter fare. What I found even more surprising is that Valiant Hearts also aspires to be a war game which largely (if not entirely) eschews player violence. Most of all, as a self-styled indie game aficionado I was surprised that I hadn’t heard about these games since Valiant Hearts: The Great War released all the way back in 2014 while its sequel Coming Home came out just last year. For these reasons I was actually excited to have the opportunity to dive in as I’d never really gotten to experience the stories of those who survived the War to end all Wars.
I was initially quite taken by the charm of Valiant Hearts as its art and music make it feel like a Ken Burns war documentary set to a child’s storybook. The difficult side of this charm is that it ends up stealing any sense of dread, specifically for the primary antagonist Baron von Dorf who is depicted more as a mustache-twirling buffoon than the war criminal he obviously is. This is, unfortunately, broadly the case for how Valiant Hearts depicts the politics of the period. I realize that its main goal is to tell personal stories around the war and it does generally succeed in that; like I said there’s a ton of heart here. But to take an antiseptic or even “both sides'' approach to the roles of nations and how their actions led to the bloodiest conflict in history to that point and the outright ban of chemical weapons in 1925, is discomfiting coming from a game clearly designed as a cautionary tale about the desolation of war. In fact, there are many events in the game where the charm of Valiant Hearts seems to undermine the emotional bearing of almost any terrible event, whether it’s the too forgiving rhythm-based minigame that has you sawing off a soldier’s arm or the rather brief and ham-fisted allusion to American segregation during the war.
Chop-Chop Revolution?
Valiant Hearts is best categorized as a puzzle-platforming game which is very light on tension or challenge. In the unlikely event that you have a character death or fail to solve one of the few time-sensitive events, the game reloads without any real sense of consequence. All the puzzles are simple and often drawn out with an uncomfortable amount of backtracking which brings the narrative to an absolute crawl. This, unfortunately, makes the gameplay start to feel more and more like homework over time. I did enjoy that the hidden items of Valiant Hearts were not just another collect-a-thon but used to introduce interesting trivia tidbits about the times and culture of Europe during the Great War. In fact, I enjoyed that the game went to lengths to share lots of general textbook-ish blurbs about the time and locale through which the characters play. I could see Valiant Hearts having some limited potential as a bridge tool for teaching, but the gameplay will likely struggle to keep even a middle school history student engaged for very long.
This particular scene summed up my Valiant Hearts experience perfectly: Concise, but tone deaf.
The Valiant Hearts Collection tries telling an emotionally compelling story where its villains are cartoonishly short of evil, its protagonists speak in incomprehensible honks a la Charlie Brown, the difficulty of the game is non-existent, and overall tends to speak with a jarringly Seussian tone which too often left me asking myself: “Who is this for?” It is in an odd liminal state of being too mature for children and neither mature enough for adults nor academically comprehensive enough for amateur war historians. Its music and art create an atmosphere that is beautiful if not exactly compelling, and rarely manages to be more than wryly humorous or occasionally morose.
These games do have lovely personal stories to tell through both The Great War and Coming Home, it’s just unfortunate that both are games which end up feeling more like homework than intrigue. I find myself frustrated that I wanted to enjoy these games as they have the bones of a lovely series of parables about the gross injustice and unthinkable human cost of war but was simply left wanting. Nevertheless, it’s obvious that there was a ton of research and heart invested in these games and I applaud the attempt. If you’re a narrative nerd looking for a change of pace from your average shoot ‘em up war story or maybe a parent looking for an interesting alternative method to teaching your middle schooler about World War I, maybe give the Valiant Hearts a look.
About the Author:
John is the newest author to join the ranks of Podcasters United! John's 30+ year love affair with gaming first started on the tabletop and eventually segued into digital dungeon diving with the original Legend of Zelda on NES. He retired from technical work on air and spacecraft in 2021 and now teaches full-time. When he's not working or gaming he's avidly writing and reading all things sci-fi and fantasy.