Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream Review – Rise Up, Urchins!
While it’s worth noting that genre, especially in relation to video games, can often be nebulous, it’s also worth noting that some terms nonetheless evoke a set of expectations, and within those expectations it’s, err, worth noting that Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream isn’t a stealth game.
The above has to be said because first impressions last, and the initial impression that Ericksholm set for itself saw me take my first step on the wrong foot. Best to just get this cleared up for everyone else from the get go.
There is a lot of sneaking around, sure – the very first in-world note that players can find uses a neighbour complaining about noise as a mediator to instruct that footsteps on certain surfaces matter –, but in reality stealth is just the wool. Rugged up in it, hiding in plain sight, is a wolf that is much better thought of as a puzzle game.
Eriksholm opens with a lavish cutscene. Detailed character models, baked in gorgeously warm lighting, discuss – with facial animations impressive enough to shame much larger studios – events that lay the bedrock of the narrative and world. Skip forward a beat, and the main character, Hanna, has wisely decided to distrust the coppers that invited themselves into her home and has sneaked out through (because this is very much a video game) a vent.
Eriksholm takes place in a fictional location after which it is named, based largely on 20th century Swedish cities; it was announced in mid 2024 and if it’s allegory to anything, it’s likely something close to the developers. That said, a lot of it sure as heck feels applicable to much of the world in 2025. At least the police in video game land have the decency to wear recognisable uniforms. Regrettably, the plot and worldbuilding, while generally doing an effective job of tying its strings back together once the end rolls around, doesn’t land punches with the force hoped for at the outset.
But perhaps it’s on point to be underwhelmed by the overall thematic communication. That opening cinematic whets the appetite in a way that is somewhat at odds with how the game looks – it’s quite beautiful, but also aggressively distant and isometric in presentation – for all but a couple of other closed cinematic moments. That’s kind of a thing with Ericksholm: it sets up expectations for one thing, and then delivers on something else.
But back to that actual gameplay itself. Again, it becomes easier to accept and gel with Eriksholm once thinking of it as a puzzle game with stealth theming. Sure, objectives pretty much bounce exclusively between quiet escape and infiltration, avoiding the police is a must, and you can even do things like peering through windows to ensure that the coast is clear before entering a room or building, but this all comes with a total absence of chaos. Chaos here being the fine hair that is split when calling stealth and character puzzle games out as meaningfully different things.
Chaos manifests in stealth games as a result of fuck ups big and small (or even just the world doing its own thing). Spotted by a guard? Better find a really good hiding spot, or shoot them in the face, or… or something. Make a bit too much noise or hide a body in the wrong place? You had best be prepared to have that body turn into a pile of them, or find a whole new approach to reaching your destination. Simply being spotted does not mean that a stealth game’s mission is over; not unless the player manually hits restart themselves. Heck, most stealth games have varied levels of awareness to your presence that affects adversary behaviours in ways that dictate how drastically the player must adapt.
It’s perhaps a bit silly, how generous stealth games can be with how long it can take for the player to be truly noticed, but it’s also been fine-tuned with dynamic gameplay responses over the past couple of decades.
The window of time for getting back behind cover if you wander into a guard’s line of sight in Ericksholm is frequently shorter than the canned animation required to turn around or climb back down. And if you are seen (and you will be), then it’s an on/off switch: game over, try again. There is no real enemy A.I. here, no meaningful adjustment in adversary behaviour. Sedated a copper with a sleep dart, only for his body to be found by another? That’s a restart. Get seen, or have a body discovered, by someone who is themselves less than a second from passing out from a sleep dart? You had better believe you’ll be trying that again.
Why must the game insist on restarting if the police officer who just spotted you is in the process of blacking out, and therefore has no immediate in-world consequence? The only answer I can come up with is because the puzzle wasn’t solved exactly as designed.
Time & Place
More than usual, it may bear special mention that this review is of the console version of the game in question. In small part because this helps explain our late publishing date (console keys went out considerably later than Steam ones), but in most part because multiple aspects of Eriksholm feel like they were designed with a PC very much at the front of mind. The zoomed-out isometric would feel much more at home on a monitor, and the control – both character and camera – really does feel like keyboard and mouse were the true intent.
To be fair, it has been pretty well adapted to a controller, but kicking back on the sofa several feet from the screen to play this game always feels a little bit like eating watermelon in the arctic. The fruit may be good, but you’re not really in the place for it. If you have a machine that’s up to snuff, then take a serious look at the PC version if Eriksholm looks like it may be for you.
Eriksholm is all about its baked design. It doesn’t react to the player, and only really allows creative actions if they’re factored into the actual solution (getting away with sedating an intoxicated guard because his partner just assumes he must have passed out would be way cooler were it not the predetermined path forward). It has rules, and it abides strictly to them. Everything can be replicated. Throw a stone onto a metal surface to cause a distraction? Anyone who hears it will react the exact same way every single time. Send a gathering of birds scattering from where they were pecking at the ground? Rest assured that they’ll flock right back if you wait half a moment, just in case you need them to cause a distraction.
Police patrol patterns? Fucking clockwork.
Furthermore, shadows offer God-tier protection that nobody will be able to find a player-character in unless they very directly cut it with a torch. Guard behaviour and line-of-sight is as systematic as it can be (although, as a nice bit of presentation, things like cones of vision are only displayed when contextually relevant). It’s all about learning the loop, scanning the situation and then successfully implementing the solution.
Some stress has to be placed on that there successful implementation of the solution bit; there’s a little more to Eriksholm than lining all of the ducks up in a row and pulling a lever to set everything in motion. Things are simple enough early on, when the player merely has to guide Hanna, unseen, through a series of puzzle courses. However, over time, she will gain one companion, and then another. When all three become involved, puzzles become more complex, sometimes requiring precise timing when switching between the character that the player is controlling.
Perhaps this is why shadow has to provide such perfect cover, as much of the game time will be spent with two player characters just kind of standing around and twiddling their thumbs (on console, at least). Or maybe crouching; stances are context sensitive and happen automatically.
It’s all in service of a trial-and-error approach, at poking at the surface to find the one, correct way forward. It’s why ammo is unlimited, but is tied to a cooldown timer. There is only one way through, and that path is delicately controlled. Each character has unique abilities, but some of them are less logical than others. Maybe one is a dead aim at throwing pebbles, but it seems very silly that she’s the only one who can throw them at all.
But of course it’s like this. If just anyone could throw a stone it would potentially break the precisely crafted solution that has been designed for the player.
To Eriksholm’s absolute credit, each new chapter and area manages to change things up somewhat. The nature of the situations switch with enough frequency that things never get repetitious or stale. This often comes in the form of a new character or ability (Hanna doesn’t start out with her sleep darts, for one), but scenarios can also get mixed up: at one point Hanna may have to regularly toy with factory machinery to create distractions and cover, while later the focus might be on reading a cypher to find the correct path forward.
If nothing else, it all feels polished. Everything runs well, and the fictional spin on Europe here has a strong sense of visual identity, even if Unreal Engine 5 can be spotted working behind the scenes. The lighting, in particular, can be quite striking. Likewise, voice acting is solid (if maybe pushing a mite too heavily on the street urchin vibe), and it comes through very clearly. Which is perhaps just as well, considering how prone Hanna is to talking through objectives out loud to herself
Elsewhere, some light worldbuilding duty is dusted onto a handful of collectables that offer no real reward beyond the basic information they contain. It’s appreciated restraint, although given how rigidly videogame-y many of the core mechanics that sit beneath the more serious-faced exterior are, it’s possible that some players may feel cheated by a lack of larger rewards.
Eriksholm is a bit of an odd one, then. It’s in conflict with its own first-impression, certainly. What starts with a cinematic flex and promise of stealth quickly turns into a much more rigid puzzle game, one that often requires experimental trial and error to find (or, indeed, properly execute) the correct solution. Getting into the correct mindspace is key to enjoying it, and it’s a small shame that the game itself arguably pushes player expectations in the wrong direction for a spell. It is nonetheless a satisfying little romp; not a game changer for the industry at large, perhaps, but it’s smartly built to a realistic scope and also manages to be a nice little dollop of something slightly different in its own way.
Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream was reviewed on a PS5 Pro with a code kindly supplied by the publisher.
