Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream review

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream review
By: Euro Gamer Posted On: July 14, 2025 View: 2

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream offers luxurious cutscenes and a focused twist on stealth by remaining intentionally inflexible, but doesn't quite pull it all together.

The stealth strategy genre lost one of its great studios two years ago when Mimimi Games, developers of Shadow Tactics, Desperados 3, and Shadow Gambit decided, after that string of absolute bangers, to call it a day. In lieu of a new Shadow game from the masters, River End Games - a new group of industry veterans whose CVs cover everything from Unraveled 2 to Battlefield - have stepped into that void with Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream, and it makes a fairly good crack at scratching that itch.

The first thing to note is this is a game that strips the genre back to its bare essentials. You're eased in gently - controlling nimble-footed Hanna, the game's main protagonist, as she cleverly makes her way through her home borough while it's crawling with cops. It takes a while before Eriksholm gives you any sort of offensive capability, and even longer until the two other player characters, Alva and Sebastian, become fully available to you.

You'll spend a lot of the early game utilising the basics of cover, shadow, and distraction to evade the plod, and it's pretty clear early on that Eriksholm absolutely nails the fundamentals. New abilities are revealed as you progress through the story, including the ability to fling pebbles to distract guards, a medium range stun in the form of a blow dart, and a burly chokehold from the biggest, heaviest character in the squad. (Who is incidentally also the only one who can swim, however that works.) Alva can climb drain pipes, Hanna can squeeze through vents. These are obviously all pretty run-of-the-mill stealth-tactics abilities and archetypes - essentially the moveset of x1 Ezio, only spread across three distinct characters that complement each other, turning the more complex encounters into a satisfying game of single player co-op.

Here's an Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream trailer to show it in action.Watch on YouTube

What this isn't, to be absolutely clear, is a sandbox. Eriksholm is very deliberate about which characters and abilities you have access to at any given moment. You don't actually spend that much of the game playing with the full toolset, which speaks to the fact that this - on the quiet - is actually a puzzle game wearing the skin of something else. That's not a criticism: many of the best games are.

Every encounter is designed with a set solution in mind: thinking back over my time with it, I can think of only a handful of occasions where you're given any leeway in how the required sequence of events plays out. Guard A must be taken out before Guard C, but make sure you're ready to choke Guard B, etc etc. The fixed nature of this relatively short experience may be seen as a negative to some, but I found it compelling to figure out each of the game's many chunks, often through trial and error, sometimes through simply observing each guard rotation, noting the placement of cover objects or unique environmental factors, and nailing it first time. Eriksholm is a game of deftly balanced difficulty that is challenging, but never annoys, and often makes you feel clever: particularly when all three characters are working in lockstep to clear a tricky bit, directed by your invisible hand to act at precisely the right moments in a carefully mapped out sequence. It's difficult to pull off a tactics game that doesn't frustrate without unwittingly making the game too easy, and though I'll grant that these things are subjective, I regard this balance as one of many hallmarks of Eriksholm's deeply competent design.

Eriksholm screenshot showing an aerial view of you sneaking through a hedge maze
Image credit: Eurogamer / Nordcurrent Labs

Deeply competent too is its presentation. The game is set in some northwestern region of Europe during an alternate early-1900s. It's not steampunk as much as it's a remix: the city of Eriksholm and its surroundings feel familiar enough to be tangibly real. It's inspired by pre-war Scandinavia, but in the architecture and colour palette there are glimpses of northern France, Dover, even the craggier bits of Scotland. And it's a gorgeous game, with streets and alleys that feel appropriately lived in, labyrinthine shanty towns, dank and mossy smugglers' coves, medieval fortresses retrofitted with WW1-era armaments, and more.

It's an ambitious road-trip of a game, and though its vastly pulled-out camera no doubt does a lot to mask its budget, Eriksholm never feels less than premium. Especially not during its smattering of pre-rendered cutscenes, which feature incredible facial-mocap: emotive digital acting, capturing the real subtleties of a performance that can, for example, hint at vulnerability that the character is working hard to hide.

Eriksholm screenshot showing you sneaking through a grey industrial area at night with question mark symbols over enemy heads
Eriksholm screenshot showing you sneaking by a guard in an office, while behind a pile of crates
Image credit: Eurogamer / Nordcurrent Labs

You can tell these scenes were expensive because there's so few of them. Mercifully so, to be honest. As good as they are on a technical level, as much as one can appreciate the brilliant work of the actors involved, Eriksholm's weakest element is its story. It's perfectly satisfactory as the connective tissue between the game's many distinct zones, but it's lacking something: a real hook, real stakes.

Eriksholm leaves you to fill in a lot of the gaps with its world building and narrative. That can be a clever approach when there's a tapestry of intrigue to thread together, or when a certain vagueness or unreliable narration allows for the kind of fractal speculation that launches entire YouTube careers. None of that is really going on here, it's more like the game gets so caught up in its grand conspiracy plot that it glosses over a couple of key pieces of information that would properly explain, say, the villain's motivation. I mean, from what I could piece together, he's just a prick.

It's a pity, because there's some lovely stuff in here. For example, Alva is a Fagin archetype with de facto control of a city territory and an army of Artful Dodgers at her command. The dissonance with which she keeps a hold of the businesslike hard-heartedness required to ruin her empire and the maternal instinct that she tries - often unsuccessfully - to keep in check is one of the more interesting emotional conflicts in a story rammed to the gills with them. If they ever do a sequel, it should be about her. The game is funny too - the more memorable encounters involve incidental scenes with couples bickering, guards getting on each other's nerves, a cheating spouse, the curtain-twitching miscellany of lives yet to be interrupted by you and your wrecking ball of player agency.

Eriksholm screenshot showing Hannah talking to you over a table during a cutscene
Image credit: Eurogamer / Nordcurrent Labs

Alas, for all of the obvious talent involved, the sumptuous visuals and note-perfect stealth gameplay, Eriksholm just doesn't quite come together, and the ending is liable to leave you feeling bereft as it all crescendos into hard cutscene trigger rather than some fateful final encounter or climactic set-piece. Don't take this to mean that there aren't any set-pieces, though: there are more than a few memorable ones. Daring, bum-squeakingly tense ones. Clever use of the environment ones. Bombastic, sneaking around doing stealth takedowns in the middle of a military skirmish ones.

So what we've got here is a mostly very good game with a perfunctory story and an underwhelming ending. Thrilling, heart-in-your-throat stealth sequences that make you feel alive, let down by the thread that strings them together. A game of two distinct parts, then, rather than a cohesive whole, and I think a glaring missed opportunity to do something properly memorable in its final chapter.

Satisfying. Sumptuous. Moreish. Fun. All the right adjectives are in play, and in a medium where half of the audience are listening to podcasts rather than engaging actively with a game's actual storytelling, it's tempting to suggest that the iffy story doesn't really matter. But it is supposed to be the thing that carries you through. Your motivation, your emotional connection to an alternate world. A plane can fly without tyres, but it can't stick the landing. It can't take off without tyres either, I know - I'm imagining a scenario where something happens to the tyres after it's in the air - I suppose. Maybe a dog chews them. Look shut up. You get it.

A copy of Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream was provided for review by Nordcurrent LAbs.

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