Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream review — A brilliant narrative driven stealth adventure

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream is a brilliant testament to what a small team of dedicated individuals can accomplish, with River End Games releasing one of the best narrative-driven stealth adventures in a long while. Eriksholm features a moving, tragic, and ultimately hopeful story, mixed with fun stealth gameplay, and increasingly difficult scenarios to navigate. From its humble beginnings to its epic end, Eriksholm delivers in spades.

Eriksholm doesn’t waste time spelling out its backstory, instead it thrusts the player directly into the story, allowing them to piece together the past from conversations and collectibles found throughout the world. This is an approach I greatly appreciate, as it serves the overarching story well while allowing the game to maintain momentum without getting bogged down in exposition. Essentially though, Hannah, our protagonist, has just awoken from a serious bout of Heartpox, a savage disease spreading through Eriksholm with a high mortality rate. She awakens to find herself alone before the authorities, at the bequest of Eriksholm’s corrupt mayor, arrive at her door. It seems that her brother Herman has gone missing, along with a mysterious object of significance. Hannah evades the guards and heads out of town, enlisting the help of friends Alva and Sebastian on her hunt to find Herman before the authorities do.

The relationship between these characters serves as the backbone of Eriksholm, weaving a tale rife with grudges, hope, betrayal, humor, and forgiveness. As Eriksholm is heavily focused on its narrative, to provide any more detail would be a disservice to this well-crafted story. 

Eriksholm is an isometric stealth game, with a huge emphasis on the stealth aspect. Hannah, Alva, and Sebastian are treated as humans. Capable, yes, but ultimately easily dispatched or overwhelmed. This means that remaining hidden is imperative to survival. There are no heroes here, instead progression requires teamwork between your characters and a slow, methodical approach to each scenario you encounter.

The first quarter or so of the game you play as only Hannah, allowing you to get a feel for the gameplay mechanics, before adding Alva, and then finally adding Sebastian to complete the trifecta. Thankfully, Eriksholm is great at introducing new concepts and characters and then merging them seamlessly into existing gameplay elements without ever becoming confusing or frustrating. 

Each character has specific abilities, which blend together to allow this scrappy trio to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds. Hannah is small and can crawl through grates to enter into otherwise unreachable rooms. She is also equipped with a blowgun, which she can use to subdue enemies for a short period. Alva is equipped with a slingshot, which can be used to destroy lights, allowing you to remain hidden, and can also be used to create noise for a diversion. Alva is also able to shimmy up pipes to reach roofs or other high locations, giving her a vantage point unavailable to either Hannah or Sebastian. Sebastian has no long-range weapons, but he is capable of performing chokeholds on unsuspecting victims, and is capable of swimming, helping him reach otherwise unreachable areas.

Players can swap between Hannah, Alva, and Sebastian at any time once they join your team by simply pressing left, right, or down on the diagonal buttons. Be ready to experiment, as each encounter is structured so that you cannot progress without becoming comfortable with each member’s playstyle and utilizing each in turn as even areas that look quite simple to traverse at first often prove to be deceptively complex to navigate safely. 

While your group is capable of taking down enemies, many times it is better to figure out how to distract guards long enough to rush by unseen instead. Taking down an enemy can only be done when there is no possible way another guard can see the takedown, and requires you to hide the body, as finding a body will alert all nearby guards and result in an automatic game over.  Further preventing you from mass takedowns is the fact that enemies are surprisingly smart. They often work in pairs and search areas in smart ways, rarely providing more than split second opportunities to make your move. This becomes even more standard as you progress, because the enemies begin to react to their colleagues being taken down by your group, and increasingly become more nervous. This leads to them actively creating plans to stay safe, including a memorable moment where only two guards remained in a room so one went on patrol and whistled the entire time to inform the other guard that he was still safe. Scenarios like this pop up throughout the campaign, ensuring Eriksholm is always throwing new objectives at you to overcome. 

So, now that I’ve gushed about the gameplay, I want to move on to another aspect which is equally as impressive: the world itself. Eriksholm may be a fictional town, but it is one created in vivid detail, chock full of interesting NPCs, detailed scenery, and a large variety of locations to traverse, all brought to life via incredible voice acting and graphics. 

What really stood out to me though was the emphasis on realism. Guards in Eriksholm act exactly how you would imagine a real-life guard would act. They get bored of patrol, they stumble around aimlessly, they jump between mundane topics, they question their superiors, and they often flee when they realize they are in danger, as opposed to becoming aggressive. The realism extends to other NPCs as well. During your adventure you’ll sneak around areas brimming with wealthy socialites, and in doing so will often be provided a chance to eavesdrop on their conversations. There is not one time in Eriksholm where I felt any of the characters acted unrealistic, and the incredible voice acting from all involved really helped sell these various interactions.

If I have any gripes about Eriksholm, it would be that, while complex, most areas have only one real route to success. For a first playthrough this is fine, as discovering that route often requires quite a lot of experimentation, but I could imagine on subsequent playthroughs you may wish for a bit more freedom in your approach. So, while a gripe, it is a minor one, considering just how well-made Eriksholm is on the whole. I highly recommend Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream for fans of the stealth genre, fans of narrative-focus adventures, or just fans of well-designed games.