Fancy a gripping story game? Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream turns the dial up to max in terms of story and atmosphere and impresses in our review with its magnificent graphics.
Video games could soon cost $100. Whether they’re worth it is up to each individual to decide.
I only know one thing: I would pay more than the fair $40 that developer River End Games and publisher Nordcurrent Labs are asking for Eriksholm on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
Admittedly, the unique stealth adventure with ten hours of gameplay doesn’t offer the most extensive package, but the packaging and content are top notch. But anyone who has followed GlobalESportNews‘s coverage of Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream already knows all that.
Table of Contents
Sneak – or fail
To enjoy Eriksholm as much as I did, you need to have the right expectations. What I can promise you is a beautiful, thrilling story trip to a city dripping with atmosphere.
You’ll meet intelligently written characters, follow an emotional plot, and discover countless details about an imaginative scenario that you can immerse yourself in like a good book.
They populate beautiful but extremely linear levels in which you follow a predetermined path to your goal, solving countless little logic puzzles along the way that are disguised as stealth challenges. Your top priority is to proceed undetected.
The design is very linear, with no freedom of choice or alternative solutions. You must reach a specific destination using the combination of tools and characters specified by the developer as correct, and you must not be noticed along the way.
Eriksholm makes no compromises: if one of your up to three characters is seen by guards or an opponent you have knocked out is discovered, it’s game over immediately. You have no chance to run away or fight your way out. Instead, you have to restart from the last save point. Fortunately, this is almost always very fair; you don’t miss the lack of a quick save function. Only sometimes it’s annoying that the game is so keen to tell its story that the NPCs blocking your way have to finish their conversations before they move on.
The first time around, this seems elegant because I learn so many details about the town of Eriksholm. I get to know the background and characters better without the game overwhelming me with exposition. But when I play a scene three or four times and have to listen to the same dialogue every time, I have to bite my tongue to keep from wishing the developers to the sixth circle of hell.
Great team
In the ten hours I spent playing, I only found such situations annoying because they stand in such stark contrast to the otherwise successful gameplay. Sneaking around is generally a lot of fun because the challenge increases organically and new elements are introduced regularly.
The abilities of the three heroes, Hanna, Alva, and Sebastian, complement each other perfectly. I shoot out a lamp, choke an enemy from behind in the darkness until he passes out, stun another with a blowpipe, and squeeze through a ventilation shaft with Hanna while Alva climbs up the rain gutter onto the building and Sebastian reaches the quay with a few strong strokes.
This interaction between the characters, with no pause function and under the watchful eyes of the patrolling city guards, feels fantastic, just like in Desperados or Commandos back in the day. However, Eriksholm is more accessible and simpler in every respect; it revives the feeling of the classics without being able to completely replicate their depth of gameplay.
That’s not what developer River End Games is aiming for, as the focus here is clearly on the narrative. And that’s impressive in more ways than one.
The story is everything
In search of her brother, Hanna takes on the mayor and the corrupt police of Eriksholm. The plot develops as expected, with no big surprises in the distribution of good and evil, but it is excellently told.
Great dialogue direction and emotional highlights make this adult story a highlight.
Thanks to performance capture, the cutscenes are of such high quality that they would fit into a big AAA production.
The scenes are perfectly accompanied by a minimalist but always appropriate piano soundtrack. In addition, there is English voice acting that brings the characters to life and ensures exciting back-and-forth even in cutscenes from an isometric perspective. There is no German dubbing, but the subtitles are excellently translated.
Thanks to Unreal Engine 5, the eponymous town of Eriksholm looks simply fantastic. The camera can be rotated freely and zoomed to a limited extent, the controls remain simple and clear, the performance is outstanding, and loading times are virtually non-existent.
Intelligently reduced
In each of the eight chapters, you can find notes and collectibles that add small details to the atmosphere. However, if you leave them behind, you won’t miss anything. Certainly not upgrades or anything like that, because all progress is story-driven and only happens when the developers want it to.
Eriksholm doesn’t waste its players’ time; every level and every scene contributes to the story and thus feels worthwhile. Conversely, this also means that the missions really only function as vehicles for the story.
If you like to try a different approach in other stealth and tactics games, you’ll hit a wall in Eriksholm. A second playthrough is exactly the same as the first, so don’t expect any variation, room for experimentation, luck, or improvisation.
This is only meant as a minor criticism: I like the game that River End Games has designed! And I’m sure many of you will too. But not everyone appreciates the same qualities in this genre, not everyone wants to be told a story first and foremost.
If you belong to this group of players, you might want to steer clear of Eriksholm. But that would be a shame!
So little to criticize
For a development team of this size (only 17 employees!), River End Games has polished its debut game to a high shine. The gameplay never gets boring, there’s plenty of variety, and many stealth classics have made a comeback.
Okay, the little physics puzzles with a crane may not be the highlights.
But there’s also:
- Metal surfaces that make a lot of noise when you move around (and grass where you can run without thinking).
- Machines that make noise and distract enemies.
- Pigeons startled by movement that attract enemies like magnets.
- Searchlights and enemies with lamps that rob the darkness of its protective cloak.
- Elite enemies that must first be stunned with a poison arrow and then knocked out from behind.
With its high visual appeal, dense atmosphere, and challenging but not overwhelming stealth puzzles, Eriksholm is perfect for anyone who likes to immerse themselves in games and forget everything around them. And all that for just $40.
Editor’s conclusion
If you’ve been playing PC and console games for over 30 years, nothing surprises you anymore. Or so I thought. Then came Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream, and it thrilled me like no game has done in a long time. There are several reasons for this.
First, there’s the high-quality story presentation with stylish in-game cutscenes, emotional music, and superb English voice acting. Then there’s the dense atmosphere of a city that could have come straight out of games like Thief or Dishonored, where magnificent vistas and moral decay exist side by side. And finally, on top of all that, there’s sophisticated gameplay from an isometric perspective that rewards silent progress and emphasizes stealth over combat.
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There’s little not to love about a mix like this. For me, Eriksholm is just missing a little more playful freedom to be a masterpiece. If the beautifully designed levels offered one or two alternative routes, or if the enemy AI wasn’t so stubborn that the guards couldn’t be eliminated in exactly the way the developer intended… Oh well, I’m just fantasizing. I’ll just send this to River End Games as a wish list.
They should implement that in part 2. I’ll buy it blind, I promise.
