Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream Review – Stealth, Secrets & Family Drama!

PC/PS/XBOX - Reviewed on Steam/PC

In a nearly industry-wide effort to broaden the appeal of the ever-so-neglected stealth genre, most games in the last decade and a half or so claiming to feature it put an emphasis on player choice – go quiet, go loud, use disguises, distractions, and ultimately play your way.  There’s merit to this design approach, with games like Hitman, Assassin’s Creed, and Metal Gear Solid V offering massive stealth sandboxes with a level of improvisational freedom that few experiences can match.  The problem with this being the new status quo, however, is that trying to cater to everyone leaves the sort of challenge craved by stealth purists in the dust – after all, if the only consequence of getting caught is having to play the game in a way that’s not stealthy, where’s the motivation to self-impose the sort of patient sneaking that classic stealth titles built their legacy upon?

Truthfully, even as what I’d consider a stealth purist myself, it’s easy to understand that old-school experiences like the original Splinter Cell required a sometimes-infuriating amount of patience to track guard patterns, tiptoe carefully around broken glass, and use every single piece of a relatively limited arsenal to succeed.  Stealth in a game like that isn’t optional – you go quiet, or you die, respawning at the last checkpoint with nothing to show for it but a ding on your pride.  But on the flip side, there’s no feeling of accomplishment quite like taking out an army’s worth of guards from the shadows without anyone becoming the wiser.  And while I can’t blame anybody for not having their acorns tickled at the prospect of slowly dragging a body into a dark spot you created by shattering a lightbulb, the fact that the number of games featuring this anymore is basically zero seems to me like a minor gaming tragedy.

There’s a time and a place for the “play how I want” design philosophy, and sometimes I just don’t want it.  Sometimes, I want the sort of design that forces me into a difficult situation and demands that I figure out how not to get caught.  Learn to hide and adapt knowing that my options are limited and there will be no action hero-ing my way out if I screw it all up.  So now, I’ll take a step off my soapbox and introduce you to quite possibly my favorite pure stealth game in years – Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream.

Eriksholm’s namesake is the fictional city it takes place in, a gorgeous slice of 1900s Scandinavia bustling with life and yet teeming with the tension wrought by not only the rise of industrialization and the class divides it’s created, but also a sudden deadly plague referred to as Heartpox.  Our main protagonist, Hanna, living in Eriksholm with her brother Herman after the passing of their mother, was lucky enough to recover from Heartpox with Herman by her side.  But one day when Herman doesn’t return from work, Hanna’s life is thrust into chaos as police suspiciously demand she come with them for questioning in relation to his whereabouts.  With her distrust for authority on full display, Hanna makes a daring escape and embarks on a journey to find Herman and figure out what it is that he’s done to command a citywide manhunt.

It's not unusual for me to come into a narrative-focused indie game like this with relatively low expectations, understanding that limits around budget can compromise an experience’s cinematic intentions.  Yet with Eriksholm, virtually every aspect of its story and presentation knocks it out of the park.  The script feels nuanced and well-written, carefully conveying its themes through snappy, superbly-voiced dialogue, readable notes found throughout the environment, and the level of restraint to know when to show rather than tell.  It helps, too, that its pre-rendered cutscenes feature fantastically expressive character detail to a degree indistinguishable from a AAA production.  And while I wished that each character’s backstory was more fleshed out, the overall plot is well-paced, high-quality, and consistently compelling from start to finish.

While the narrative is bound to draw you in as-is, Eriksholm’s commitment to an uncompromisingly challenging pure stealth experience is what kept me glued to the screen.  The game presents in an isometric perspective similar to other recent stealth titles like Desperados III or Shadow Gambit, but married with the cinematic focus of A Plague Tale.  You’ll play only as Hanna for the first few chapters, but eventually evolve to controlling 2-3 characters at once, each with their own special stealth abilities like climbing pipes or breaking lights to create the cover of darkness.  Successfully making it through a level will require you to use everyone’s abilities together in ways that are sometimes tricky to figure out, creating an experience that feels like an elaborate tactical puzzle in the way that the best stealth games often do.

I was not being facetious in my use of the word “uncompromising” though, because the rigidity of Eriksholm’s stealth systems is bound to turn more than a few people off.  I still remember back in Splinter Cell’s prime that fans and reviewers loudly voiced distaste for its occasional instant-fail stealth scenarios, where getting caught would mean sending you back to the last checkpoint.  For these folks, playing an entire game with this limitation might sound about as fun as back-to-back colonoscopies.  And indeed, Eriksholm demands that you stay hidden and operate from the shadows or behind cover, because getting spotted or having a body be discovered will mean sending you back to the last checkpoint.  On one hand, this forces a slow and deliberate pace that not everybody has the patience for, and can be frustrating if you get spotted by a guard who you didn’t know was there.  On the other, checkpoints only take you back a matter of seconds, and consistently ensure you’re never losing any material progress.  I personally think this just about negates the frustration that can be caused by these instant-fail scenarios, and it also maintains some immersion since the story beats effectively demand that no guards ever see you.  

It's also worth pointing out that part of why Eriksholm’s stealth will feel so unforgiving to some is that it’s a very strictly linear game that requires you to puzzle your way through the scenarios it funnels you into rather than try to find alternative approaches.  I’m not trying to frame this as a downside, because I find it very satisfying to figure out that the only way through a certain scenario is to throw a rock to distract a guard, have another character use her blowpipe to knock him out, and use a third character to drag his body into the darkness before another guard comes patrolling.  The lack of variability in these scenarios also allows the game’s cinematic DNA to shine through, as much of the experience feels tightly scripted to make the gameplay and narrative feel intertwined.  Guards will comment on lights you destroy, they’ll call out to their missing comrades by name and go searching for them if they don’t respond, and behave in other immersive, sometimes unpredictable ways not because the AI is so fantastic as to let these scenarios happen naturally, but because the game is so tightly constructed that its clearly-scripted sequences feel like a natural part of the gameplay.  While that won’t be to everyone’s liking, especially those more enamored with the open-world stealth sandboxes I mentioned before, I appreciate it as a less-is-more philosophy – the fewer options you have, the more strategic you have to be about the ones you do.

I already mentioned that Eriksholm’s pre-rendered cutscenes succeed in being a gorgeous and immersive way to convey its plot, but the in-game visuals are no slouch, either.  Not only does the city of Eriksholm look impressively detailed and smooth, offering up easily understood environmental cues without cluttering the screen with much of a user interface, but I was incredibly impressed by its technical performance.  Other than one crash I had very early in the game (talking like, first 20 minutes), the entire thing ran smoothly even on the Steam Deck, though I needed to lower settings to medium in order to get a frame rate that hovered between 45-60 fps most of the time.  If anything bugged me about the visuals, it’s that the limited amount you can zoom the camera in and out feels oddly restrictive and makes playing on a small screen like the Steam Deck make me want to squint sometimes.  It was still exceptionally playable, and I managed to play at least half the game on Steam Deck alone but know that those of you with reading glasses might want to break them out if you want to play on a smaller screen. 

While Eriksholm has high-quality sound design and pretty decent music, it’s impossible not to acknowledge how much its voice actors steal the show.  Every character, down to the guards, voices their lines with the utmost conviction, ensuring the game never once fumbles its cinematic ambitions.

It took me just under 11 hours to roll credits on Eriksholm: A Stolen Dream, and that felt like an appropriate amount of time to do justice to the story it wanted to tell.  There’s an option to revisit each of its 8 chapters from the main menu, but given the strict linearity of its gameplay, there isn’t much reason to replay unless you want to go after any collectibles or readable notes you missed at the time.  But while I don’t feel much reason to return to Hanna’s journey now that I’m done, its focused approach to stealth fulfilled a need in me that almost no games manage to offer in this day and age.  And while its rigid design and restrictive camera can sometimes make it fumble, overall, this is a treat for any stealth fans that want an experience they won’t soon forget.

On our rating scale from the deplorable indie Krampus all the way up to the essential golden genie, Eriksholm: A Stolen Dream is a great game that earns itself the silver genie lamp of approval.