Emile (that's him in the tank top up above) is a French farmer whose daughter Marie is married to
a young man named Karl, who is, as you might guess, German. On the eve of the
war, the French boot all Germans out of their country, including Karl, who is
then promptly conscripted into Germany’s army, and sent to fight the French.
Brilliant thinking there, France. At least you didn’t throw him in an
internment camp. To make matters worse, Emile is then drafted by the French
Army, where he quickly meets the rest of our cast of characters. Freddy is an
African-American fellow who had found love in Paris, only to lose it to a
bombing raid led by Baron von Dorf. He’s out for blood (and also worried his
little brother may journey across the ocean to join him), but he and Emile
become friends after Emile comes to his aid against some French soldiers who were
hassling him. Anna is a young Belgian doctor living in France, who rushed back
to her home too late to save her father, a brilliant scientist, from being
captured by von Dorf. And there’s Walt, who looks like a bull terrier, and was
part of the German medic corps, but winds up alongside the others soon enough.
There’s not much fighting, not by those characters.
Occasionally you sneak up behind someone and hit them on the head, and there
are a couple of sequences where Freddy drives an early tank and shoots enemy
biplanes and pillboxes. Anna has a couple of sequences where she’s driving a
car and you have to avoid barricades and fire from enemy vehicles, set nicely to classical music pieces (when she’s
not saving a soldier’s life through first aid that you perform by pressing the
proper button in rhythm with the cardiograph along the top of the screen). Most
of the game is timing-based challenges about dodging enemy machine gun fire or
artillery, or puzzles of the “go find Tab A to insert into Slot B, and pull
lever to get Widget X” If Walter is there, he’ll likely be sent to retrieve something in
an area you can’t reach, or have him distract someone.
Occasionally the puzzles can reach a stupid number of steps.
Karl gets captured by the French at one point, but resolves to escape the
prisoner of war camp and return to Marie. Another prisoner will help, but he
needs the wire cutters that are in the medic’s office (?), guarded by a soldier
and his large dog. So Karl has to venture to the showers and fix the pipes so a
soldier will disrobe and take his shower. Having stolen the man’s suspenders,
Karl travels to the kitchen, climbs to the roof, and sends them across to a guy
on the roof of the medic office. Does the guy bring back the cutters? Of course
not! He gives you a bottle of medicine you take to the laundry and send up to
the guy working there. In return he’ll send down the finished laundry,
including a red neckerchief, which is necessary for Karl to get past some jerks
in the barracks, to acquire a pipe, which he takes to the cook. The cook runs
outside to try killing himself with lung cancer before dysentery or cholera can
get him, giving Karl the chance to steal a piece of meat, so he can lure the
dog and soldier away from the door and steal the cutters.
That’s a particularly extreme example, but jeez, that’s
gaming filtered through a visit to any central bureaucracy you’d care to name.
The story being sad isn’t enough. Giving you a cute, helpful dog which will
venture into areas with poison gas for you (so I fear for its safety
constantly) isn’t enough. No, the game has decreed we must suffer more. The
point being, I assume for the player to see the life in a prisoner of war camp.
A lot of the puzzles are like that, forcing you to move back and forth across
the screens that comprise that segment of the game, so you can see the bombed
out remains of homes, or the wounded soldiers huddled around fires. Or, when
you pause to wait for machine gunners to reload, you see other soldiers dashing
ahead and being cut down or blown up. There’s even a part where Anna needs the
shovel a soldier has, but he hasn’t finished digging a grave yet. To facilitate
the process, you have to slowly drag a big wooden cross over to him to place as
a marker.
I’m not sure how well it worked on me, because most of what
I’m describing only occurred to me in hindsight, as I’m typing this. In the
moment, I was most concerned with the characters I was playing as, and whatever
task they were trying to complete. In that cross-dragging example, I needed the
shovel because Anna was going to use it as a crutch for a wounded soldier, and
I wanted to help her make that happen. I spent a lot of the game fearing the
characters would be killed in cut scenes, where I couldn’t do anything. They
did die some during gameplay, because of my poor reflexes, but in those cases
I’m able to start at the last checkpoint, and I can erase the mistake. There
were more than a couple of cut scenes which made it seem someone had been
either gunned down, blown up, or fallen deeply sick, and I couldn’t do anything
about those. So I fretted.
I don’t know if it didn’t work because I already knew about
all that from books I’ve read, because of the slightly bloodless, simplified
art style, or if it’s just easier for me to connect with worrying about a few,
distinct people, as opposed to huge masses of soldiers who are presented
largely as blank slates. Which is probably the point, that I got to know and
care about a few of them, but there are millions of others who got cut down,
often for no good reason, before the player has a chance to know them. The game
seems to argue most of the rank and file soldiers are just trying to follow
orders and survive, and there’s no personal animosity. Emile and Walt pull a
German soldier out of a collapsed tunnel, and together they find a way out, and
then the German helps Emile escape when they encounter a patrol. And then the
German gets blown up by somebody’s attack. A few times I wondered if I was
being blasted by my own artillery, which seemed possible considering how much
trouble I had the few times I had to man an artillery piece and follow the
game’s vague instructions on what to shoot. There’s no telling what damage I
did with all those errant shells, and I’m a little surprised the game wouldn’t
show that, if there was anything. Maybe I was just hitting empty stretches of
mud and craters.
The biggest issue with Valiant Hearts as a game is that it doesn't seem like much fun to play. The story is engaging, if sad, I did care about the main characters, they use music effectively, but the actual gameplay is not entertaining. I think the gameplay was set up in service of the story and the larger points they were trying to make. I don't know how I feel about that. Games are supposed to be fun, so I want to keep playing them, but I do appreciate the effort made to build a story I care about. I don't think it's a bad game, not in terms of the overall package, but it feels like the sort of game where you might be better off watching a video of someone else playing it, so you get the story without sitting through the more tedious aspects.
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