Why you won’t kill a single person in Valiant Hearts: The Great War

Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a puzzle-adventure game set during World War I. But despite the wartime setting, it's actually not a war game. Instead, it's a game "about war" that we experience during the World War I period.

When the game was first revealed, Ubisoft stated that the goal was to share the experience of this "Great War" with a younger generation who may not be as familiar with the deadly conflict. But just because it's a war game doesn't mean you'll actually kill people. Sure, you'll experience and witness death, but it won't be by your hands. In fact, throughout the entire playthrough of Valiant Hearts: The Great War, you won't kill a single person. The reason for this, according to game and level designer Simon Chocquet-Bottani, was to keep the focus on the more "humanized" side of war.

"In order to focus on this more “humanized” side of the war, we were very careful not to have the characters kill anyone. The war kills people, but none of the characters do," Simon said in a post on the PlayStation Blog.

"We really thought that enabling players to kill someone would lead to a break in the bond between player and the character and would confuse the game’s overall message. Even while performing an indirect action, such as destroying a bridge, we made sure to show the player that the soldiers on the bridge escape BEFORE the explosion," he explained.

Elsewhere in the post, Simon discussed how the gameplay meshes with the story and moods of the different situations, but that was sort of already discussed earlier this month.

Our review for Valiant Hearts: The Great War will be coming soon.