Valiant Hearts: The Great War

Most war games hand you a rifle and a kill count. Valiant Hearts: The Great War hands you a dog and a broken heart. That inversion is the whole point, and it’s why this 2014 release from Ubisoft Montpellier still matters more than a decade on.

This is a 2D side-scrolling puzzle-adventure, not a shooter, and the distinction is load-bearing. Built on Ubisoft’s UbiArt Framework — the same expressive engine behind Rayman Legends and Child of Light — it trades photoreal grit for hand-drawn, comic-book linework that looks like a graphic novel someone spilled watercolor across. You control four strangers whose lives keep colliding along the Western Front: Emile, a middle-aged French farmer conscripted into hell; Karl, his German son-in-law deported and forced to fight for the other side; Freddie, an American who volunteers out of grief and rage; and Anna, a Belgian nurse chasing her captured father. Stitching them together is Walt, a medic dog who becomes the game’s most reliable tool and its most quietly devastating character.

Ubisoft Montpellier — the studio behind Beyond Good & Evil and much of the Rayman revival — clearly understood the assignment. Rather than gamify the trenches, they built an interactive war memorial. Real historical photographs and short educational codex articles unlock as you play, grounding the melodrama in the actual body count of Verdun and the Marne. The game slots into a small, prestigious shelf of “empathy games” alongside titles like This War of Mine and Papers, Please — commercially modest, critically adored, and impossible to shake. Its enduring reputation is earned. This is not a game you master. It’s one you survive, and then think about for weeks.

• Four Interwoven Perspectives: You rotate between Emile, Karl, Freddie, and Anna, each embodying a different nationality and stake in the war. The structure refuses a single “hero” and insists that everyone here — including the enemy — is a person losing something.
• Walt the Medic Dog: More than a mascot, Walt is a genuine gameplay mechanic. He fetches keys, crawls through gaps, retrieves items, and comforts the wounded. He’s the emotional anchor and, functionally, your Swiss Army knife.
• UbiArt Hand-Drawn Aesthetic: A storybook art style that makes horror legible without making it gratuitous. Chemical gas, artillery, and mud have never looked this painterly — or this pointed.
• Historical Codex: Unlockable archival photos and factual write-ups turn the campaign into a stealth history lesson. It’s the best classroom WWI content has ever gotten inside a game.
• Combat-Light, Compassion-First Design: You heal, hide, dig, and run far more than you fight. Survival and rescue drive nearly every chapter.

The Gameplay Loop

Let’s be honest about the mechanics up front, because the marketing won’t: the puzzles are easy. This is an adventure game in the classic point-and-solve tradition, and its brain-teasers rarely ask you to break a sweat. You’ll pull levers, dig tunnels, mix rudimentary chemistry to counter gas attacks, and rotate the occasional valve. Most solutions are visible the moment a room loads. If you came for the mechanical friction of a Braid or a The Witness, you’ll be tapping your foot.

But the loop isn’t really about the puzzles. It’s about pacing your emotions. Each character’s chapter functions as a variation on a theme — Emile survives, Anna heals, Freddie charges, Karl endures — and the puzzle design bends to fit that character’s role. Anna’s segments lean on a rhythm-based medical minigame, timing button prompts to save the wounded as they flood into her care. Freddie’s chapters get action-forward, including a genuinely thrilling set of vehicle-chase sequences where Anna’s ambulance dodges shellfire to a swelling orchestral score. Emile, the everyman, mostly just tries not to die. The variety keeps a mechanically simple game from feeling repetitive across its short runtime.

Where It Gets Uncomfortable — On Purpose

The stealth sections are the weakest link. Sneaking past guards and searchlights in a POW camp is competent but rote, the kind of design you’ve played a hundred times. And here’s the tonal tightrope the game walks, sometimes wobbling: it swings between the cartoonish and the catastrophic, occasionally in the same scene. A slapstick sequence where you knock out a bumbling German officer by lobbing cabbages sits uneasily next to a wordless panel of soldiers drowning in a flooded crater. The villain, Baron Von Dorf, is a mustache-twirling caricature that belongs in a different, lighter game.

For some players, that dissonance breaks the spell. The argument here is that it mostly works — the levity is a pressure valve, the same gallows humor that kept real soldiers sane. But when it misfires, it really misfires, undercutting a somber beat with a cartoon “bonk.”

The Ending

No spoilers here. Only this: Valiant Hearts understands something most war fiction forgets — that the tragedy of WWI wasn’t a single dramatic death but the industrial, bureaucratic, grinding waste of it. The final chapter lands that thesis with a precision the puzzles never attempt. It reframes everything you’ve played. It is, flatly, one of the most affecting endings in the medium — and it arrives through mechanics, not just cutscenes, which is what makes it stick.

The core tension of the whole experience: this is a superb narrative welded to a merely-fine adventure game. The story soars. The gameplay coasts. Somehow, the sum is greater.

The art direction is the star. The UbiArt Framework renders characters as expressive, slightly exaggerated figures against backdrops that shift from golden French farmland to the ash-gray moonscape of no man’s land. Color is used with intent — warmth drains out of the palette as the war deepens. The animation carries real weight; a slumped shoulder or a dog’s cocked head communicates more than any dialogue box (and there’s almost no spoken dialogue, just grunts, mumbles, and a narrator).

The soundtrack, anchored by a recurring piano motif borrowed from a Chopin nocturne, is haunting without being manipulative. It knows when to go silent, which is rarer and harder than knowing when to swell.

Technically, this is a featherweight. A 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and its demands are modest on effectively anything with a screen. Performance is a non-issue — as it should be.

On Steam, a controller is the better input despite mouse-and-keyboard support. The medical minigames and chase sequences are timing-based, and a gamepad’s analog feedback suits them better than mashing keys. Mouse-and-keyboard works, but it’s the second-class citizen here.

On Nintendo Switch, this game finds its ideal home. The short, chaptered structure is perfect for handheld play in twenty-minute bursts, and the illustrated art is well suited to the Switch’s screen. Note that the modern Switch release is technically the Coming Home enhanced edition, which layers in additional content. Portability suits the material — there’s something fitting about carrying this intimate, human-scale story in your hands rather than pinning it to a living-room TV. If you own both, we recommend the Switch version.

Valiant Hearts: The Great War is proof that a game doesn’t need difficulty to earn its place — it needs conviction. Ubisoft Montpellier could have made another cover-shooter set in the trenches. Instead they made an interactive graphic novel that treats war as loss rather than spectacle, and pointed a mainstream publisher’s resources at empathy instead of headshots.

The seams show. The puzzles won’t tax you, the stealth drags, and the tonal balance occasionally topples. Judged purely as a game, it’s good, not great. But judged as a story you happen to play — as a memorial you walk through with a controller in your hands — it’s a special work, and one we recommend without hesitation to anyone who values what games can say, not just what they can ask of your reflexes. Play it. Then go read about the war it’s mourning. That’s the highest compliment we can pay it.