Valiant Hearts

When seeing this game released, I wanted to play it so badly, I bought it in a sale even though installing UPlay is required to play the game.

It a story about the first world war, a much overlooked era in games with cartoonish style graphics. It's a 2D side-scrolling game that consists mostly of an adventure with puzzles to solve, but has some sequences with action that require dexterity and swift clicking as well.

The story is very endearing story, it's about camaraderie, friendship, altruistic sacrifice and helping others, be they friend or foe. A nice touch, even though it's a story about war and your characters use measured violence now and then, you never shoot a rifle. Sometimes grenades need to be thrown (and this is done in a paused game kind of way, with you aiming the throw than hitting a button), sometimes you blow things up, but never you use a rifle. Tasks in the game are mostly done by making clever use of the environment you find yourself in.

I played the game with an XBOX 360 controller and the game even on PC feels like it's designed to be used with it. I haven't tried keyboard and mice, as I had read this game works best with a controller and tried so straight away and indeed the controls were very fluent and felt really natural with a controller. Sometimes the timed action sequences are hard though.

There's one element of gameplay that sometimes returns when playing Anna, a nurse, in which you need to hit the shown buttons at the right time to control the heartbeat pulse of a sick or wounded character. I managed to complete all the healing in the game except for the last one, that's also the final real action in the game. This time the sequences are fast and complicated and to top it off, in the third of three sequences to be completed in a row, a child starts crying and it's a heart-rendering noise. My pulse rises from anxiety from trying the sequence again and again and once the child starts crying, my anxiety becomes too much to click properly and even though I tried it on several days, I felt relatively stable mentally and relatively well-rested, I didn't manage to complete it. It takes a cooler mind to finish it than my easily over-stimulated and over-empathizing autistic mind for whom this part of the game quickly becomes to much. I watched the last final minutes of the game on YouTube.

All in all, the experience was wonderful, most of the time the tempo of the game is relaxing, the parts where you need to avoid objects in a taxi requisitioned for the Marne or have to avoid falling bombs and other action sequences are spaced apart with parts where you can take your time solving puzzles. But most of all the story is wonderful, really well done. I've never cared so much about characters in a video game than I did about the elder French farmer drafted into the army Emile, his son-in-law from German descent Karl, Emile's daughter Marie and the American comrade-in-arms he meets in the second scene Freddie (who's a black American, but coloured purple strangely enough).