Eriksholm Builds A Captivating World To Sneak Through But Squanders Its Storytelling Potential
Stealth action comes out of the shadows.
If you’ve played the (now-defunct) Mimimi Games’ incredible trio of stealth games (Shadow Tactics, Desperados III, Shadow Gambit), you may think you know exactly what you’re getting from the upcoming Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream. Made by Swedish developer River End Games, Eriksholm sure looks a lot like a Mimimi title, with its pulled-backed camera perspective, environments littered with places for an enterprising stealth assassin to hide, and a focus on using tricky to outwit guards. But rather than the strategic stealth sandbox of a game like Shadow Tactics, Eriksholm is aiming for a combination of stealth, puzzles, and a tightly linear story — a change that both makes Eriksholm stand out on its own merits and drags it down in the end.
You play as Hanna, a young woman who’s just recovered from a disease called Heartpox, which is currently ravaging both the city of Eriksholm and the larger industrial colonial nation it belongs to. Almost immediately, her brother Herman disappears, and when the police come looking for him, she does the sensible thing and scurries out a heating vent in their home to track him down herself.
Eriksholm’s story is the least compelling part of an otherwise enjoyable stealth game.
Eriksholm starts slow, introducing you to an array of standard stealth tactics. Stick to the shadows, don’t make too much noise, use flocks of birds and rattling machinery to cause distractions as you sneak by. Before long, Hanna meets up with Alva, a woman who runs a gang of child thieves in the slums of Eriksholm, portrayed with almost none of the moral ambiguity such a setup would usually imply. Alva returns to Hanna her blowgun, which can be used to knock out guards as long as you’re not seen in the second or two before they go down.
There’s nothing surprising here if you’ve played other games in the genre, but expecting the standard experience would be a mistake. Rather than a sandbox with multiple possible approaches, Eriksholm leads you through a curated garden of stealth encounters, each of which wants to be solved in a specific way. You can push at the edges of them a little bit, but they’re clearly meant to be approached like working out a puzzle with a single solution. Getting spotted a single time will force you back to a checkpoint (the game is fortunately very generous with them), which can be a little frustrating, but does reinforce the stricter puzzle sensibilities of Eriksholm.
Every guard becomes a stealth puzzle to work out.
The fun comes in figuring out that solution and also in executing it. Eriksholm recommends playing with a controller, which seems like an odd choice, but it turns out to work wonderfully, making it more of a brisk action game than slow-paced strategy. That becomes even more of a focus later in the game when Hanna teams up with Alva and a man named Sebastian whose relationship to her I’m still not clear on, and timing their movements in tandem with each other becomes a major part of progression. Thanks to Eriksholm’s quick pace, segments where you need to use all three characters — for instance, Alva distracts a guard by throwing a rock, letting Hanna hit him with a blowdart unseen while Sebastian knocks out a second guard that would otherwise see him fall — are thrilling despite their strategic simplicity.
Every character is a one-trick pony (or two, at the most), which limits the complexity of strategies available to you, but also makes all the teamwork more important. Eriksholm also finds ways to use its stealth gameplay to do more than outwit and incapacitate guards. In one of the game’s most interesting sequences, you need to sneak into a mansion by sneaking into a suspended cart that’s being used to deliver wine from its cellars to a party outside. But it won’t move until the party is out of wine, so you sneak around the premises, eavesdropping on party goers and working out how to get them to order another bottle, whether that’s by breaking the one they’re drinking or giving them an opportunity to sneak off and knick one while on the clock.
Listening in on the unnamed NPCs going about their business around you is one of the biggest joys of Eriksholm. Sometimes they’ll give you hints about how to progress, but they often just add a lot of color to the world. You’ll hear the servants of a mansion griping out their boss as you sneak through and get glimpses of what life in Eriksholm is really like. It does a fantastic job of setting the scene without too many obtrusive cutscenes or exposition dumps.
Eriksholm’s environments are full of compelling details if you’re paying attention.
That’s especially welcome because when it comes to more traditional storytelling, Eriksholm absolutely falls flat. I’ve had to look up every character in this article aside from Hanna to remember, which should give you some idea of how memorable they all are. They’re archetypes more than people, and extremely broad ones at that. At no point did I feel any real pull to rescue Herman beyond knowing that’s what the game demands of me, and I’d be hard pressed to recall any single plot beat beyond “the gang arrives at a location and does a thing.” Sneaking through the city of Eriksholm, you’ll pick up bits of propaganda that subtly flesh out the setting, which makes it all the more shocking when an eleventh-hour plot point actually buys into that same colonial logic by introducing the threat of an exoticized foreign nation staging an invasion. It’s frankly quite gross and just a sloppy way to add stakes to the story, and really put me off what had otherwise been a banal story with plenty of interesting environmental detail.
Despite its sometimes overly simplistic stealth and a deeply uninteresting story, I had a great time with Eriksholm. Once it finds its footing with all three characters in its middle chapters, it becomes a gripping stealth showcase, challenging you to use a limited toolkit against overwhelming odds. What strikes me most about Eriksholm, though, is how it pushes stealth strategy in a more narrative direction. Yes, the story that’s being presented is dull and falls off a cliff at the end, but the promise of a narrative unraveled through snippets of overheard conversation and environmental details is a perfect fit for this kind of stealth game — I’m just hoping another game picks up the torch with a better tale to tell.
