The in-game item I'd found was a map of Belgium, carried by Albert Smith, who had fought in the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. I hadn't heard about a lot of this stuff.Īt one point I stumbled on a collectible described as "Valiant Stories Contest Memorabilia." Earlier this year, Ubisoft invited relatives of WWI veterans to submit images and stories of their family memorabilia for a chance to be included in the game. I've read several books on WWI, most of them focused on the military particulars. If you take the time to rifle through any of that, you'll learn that chlorine gas was heavier than air and tended to stagnate in shell-holes, that giant stethoscope-like devices were used to listen for enemy sappers tunneling underground, that urine-soaked cloths were the only defense against gas prior to gas masks, that the German helmet was called a Pickelhaube and that nevrosthenine injections - a magnesium and potassium cocktail I'd never heard of - were given as energy boosters to weary soldiers. The notion seems as unfathomable today as it would have a century ago. Imagine the populations of London and New York City today wiped off the face of the planet in less than half a decade. Many were disfigured for life, forced to wear prostheses or makeshift tin veneers to cover grave injuries to their faces. More than 16 million people died over the course of WWI, and another 20 million were wounded. Over the course of two dozen levels, it veers from whimsical to stomach-churning, telling a tragic story that's educational without seeming stodgy or pretentious.
Available now for consoles and PC, Valiant Hearts is set between the Battle of Marne in September 1914 and April 1917, just as the United States began to get involved in the fighting. In that light, Ubisoft Montpelier's Valiant Hearts: The Great War is an anomaly, a history-minded side-scrolling game with puzzle elements that looks like the offspring of a concept artist and a pastel cartoonist. Besides dogfighting games like Red Baron, WWI is fairly underrepresented. World War I might have been called "The Great War," but videogames have given it short shrift.
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