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Overview
Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a 2D animated adventure set against the backdrop of World War I, developed by Ubisoft Montpellier and published by Ubisoft. The game follows four playable characters, each caught in the conflict from different angles, connected by shared grief and a dog named Walt. Across four chapters, players move through historically grounded environments ranging from the French countryside and flooded trenches to bombed-out villages and snow-covered battlefields.
The game blends side-scrolling exploration with inventory-based puzzle solving, asking players to use found objects, environmental clues, and Walt's abilities to progress. Combat is largely avoided in favor of clever problem-solving, making this far more story delivery system than action game. That's a deliberate choice, and it works.
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Gameplay and mechanics
At its core, Valiant Hearts plays like a classic point-and-click adventure adapted for a controller. Each character has a distinct playstyle:
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- Emile: brute-force digging and object interaction
- Karl: stealth and evasion in enemy territory
- Anna: medical minigames tied to healing sequences
- Freddie: combat-focused sections with grenade throwing
Walt the dog acts as a fetch-and-carry mechanic, retrieving items from tight spaces the human characters can't reach. Puzzles stay logical and grounded in their wartime setting, never veering into abstract abstraction. The game also scatters collectible historical artifacts throughout each level, each paired with a short factual description of a real WWI object or event. These aren't filler. They're genuinely informative and add weight to what you're doing.
World and setting
The game's visual style draws directly from the UbiArt Framework engine, the same tech behind Rayman Legends, and renders the Western Front as an animated graphic novel. Characters are expressive and slightly stylized, which lets the game show real horror without being gratuitous. A soldier's death reads as tragedy rather than spectacle.
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The historical grounding is serious. Levels are set in real locations, Ypres, the Marne, Verdun, and the environmental design reflects period-accurate details. Loading screens provide context about the actual battles being depicted. For a game rated T by the ESRB, it handles the subject matter with more care than most games rated M.
Visual and audio design
The soundtrack, composed by Valerian Renaud and featuring classical pieces woven through original compositions, does most of the emotional heavy lifting. A piano-driven arrangement of "Stand By Me" plays at a specific late-game moment that players consistently cite as the hardest gut-punch in the entire experience. The audio design is restrained and precise, letting silence carry as much meaning as the score.
The art direction holds up well. The thick outlines and flat color palettes age gracefully, and the character animation conveys emotion without dialogue, since most characters communicate through gestures and reaction shots rather than spoken lines.
Does Valiant Hearts hold up as a puzzle-adventure game?
More than a decade after its June 2014 release, Valiant Hearts: The Great War remains one of the clearest examples of games functioning as emotional literature. The puzzles are accessible without being trivial, the story earns its emotional payoff through consistent character work, and the historical layer gives the whole experience a sense of real stakes. It's available across PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android, making it easy to find on whatever platform you prefer.
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The game runs roughly 6 to 8 hours, which is exactly long enough. There's no padding, no artificially extended grind. Every chapter moves the story forward, and the ending lands with the kind of weight that most games spend 40 hours trying to build. For players who want a narrative adventure grounded in history, this is one of the best the genre has produced.