Review | Eriksholm - The Stolen Dream
The city is vastly decaying. A young woman sneaks past uniformed soldiers, scurrying through the rubble and shadows amongst the abandoned factories. In Eriksholm, which takes its title from the city in which it takes place, there’s a satisfying, methodical pace to playing as Hanna, as you sneak by enemies, throw rocks as distractions, and time routes to avoid detection. This poverty-ridden town feels truly lived in. Corrugated iron shanties are decorated with colourful rugs, paints, and plants. As Hanna makes her way through Eriksholm, she overhears stories of people reclaiming their identities, from soldiers to cheating lovers to bickering spouses. However, while there were some good moments and set pieces in the game, I still wanted something more — more insight into this world, and more engaging gameplay to hook me in.
Not long after the sickly Hanna is given medicine by her brother Herman, guards burst into their home looking for him. This begins her long, arduous task to evade capture, find her brother, and discover why people are after him. The jaw-dropping motion-capture cutscene that introduces the game — with its showcase of emotion, down to the slightest furrowed brow and mannerism — makes for an incredibly engaging opening. This feeling doesn’t last, though. These high-end cutscenes are sparse. The vast majority of the story is far less polished in its presentation, but the game still conveys a respectable tale through its strongly voice-acted narrative and gorgeously rendered early 1900s Scandinavian cityscapes.
As an isometric stealth game, heavily zoomed out at that, much of the story is told through quips, notes, and eavesdropping. Hanna slowly trudges through the first hours of the game, limited to only observing and sneaking past guards. Eventually, you gain access to more resources and manage multiple characters, and the number of possible solutions really opens up — the most fun comes from setting up and taking out guards in unison. Hanna nimbly crawls and uses knockout darts, Alva swiftly climbs and throws rocks, and Sebastian swims and chokes out guards. Even still, each character is quite limited, but when a plan comes together it’s incredibly satisfying.
That being said, getting caught is an instant game over, and the game has little to offer in terms of replayability. Eriksholm may look like the highly open and creative Commandos or Shadow Tactics games, but it is far more reminiscent of a puzzle game. Each guard requires a specific solution to the point that the game’s code screamed when I was doing it wrong, glitching away. While playing the game, I tried thinking outside of the box and came up with an “alternative solution” four separate times, only to softlock the game on three occasions, though my fourth attempt to subvert the game’s expectations actually worked. My favourite bug had Sebastian climbing up from a ladder and not stopping. He just went straight up, floating up to the heavens until a guard caught him.
Eriksholm has a lot of potential, but I often felt it didn’t go far enough. There were some thrills, from slipping past an oppressive amount of guards through a trainyard to some gripping scenes that accompany the twists and turns of the plot. It feels like there’s more to explore in the game, but, for me, the experience does not warrant another playthrough due to its on-rails gameplay and lack of depth in the setting and characters. Both are interesting, and I want to learn more, but on the whole the game feels like the start of something that doesn't go far enough. The narrative sets up various social issues — a huge class divide in the city, technological shifts making workers redundant, and political strain from war — which all could have been further developed. The cutscenes, although polished, were infrequent, and the long stretches between them meant the game remained pretty good rather than great.
Eriksholm’s stealth-based puzzles placed alongside some great environmental storytelling make for a somewhat memorable experience. However, because of the game's linear nature, it has very little replayability. Add in a slow pace, and there isn't enough between the story's high points to justify seeing it again. Beyond the gorgeous cutscenes and beautiful environmental storytelling, what I will remember is an enjoyable number of puzzles and set pieces.
