08-08-2025
Escaping trouble with a blowpipe and a plan
The game's bold art direction and isometric perspective evoke something of a model railroad aesthetic. — River End Games
I doubt I've met anyone who is wholly immune to the charms of a story that features scenes of synchronised derring-do and impeccable teamwork. In our discordant world where time often seems out of joint, it's reassuring to see plucky individuals band together to surmount outrageous odds.
Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream , a stealth-adventure game, caters to the basic pleasure of seeing a carefully considered plan snap together. Owing to a personal matter, the game's main character, Hanna, has taken it upon herself to bring down a powerful politician who presides over her native city of Eriksholm. Assisting in her vendetta are Alva, the head of a gang that Hanna and her brother used to run with, and Sebastian, a tough and loyal friend.
When we're introduced to Hanna, she has just recovered from a serious illness. The hours of the day give way to the next when an insistent knocking on the door is followed by a police officer barging into the apartment. Casting a quick glance around the small room, the officer asks Hanna where her brother is; after she says she doesn't know, he insists that she come to the station. When Hanna walks behind a folding screen under the pretext of retrieving her bag, a clicking sound arouses the officer's suspicion. She has used a vent along the wall to give him the slip.
It doesn't take long for Hanna to realise she is a target for police, who have stationed officers around the city's transportation hubs. Eventually, she makes her way to Alva in a more rundown area of town filled with shacklike structures crowned by corrugated metal roofs.
There, Hanna retrieves her trusty blowpipe, enabling her to shoot sleeping darts into unsuspecting guards. She must be careful, though, to hide any slumbering working stiffs lest they attract their colleagues' attention. Sebastian then helps them secure safe passage into the ritzy areas of the city.
Naturally, Alva and Sebastian also have their own abilities that players will have to strategically cycle through. Alva can climb up pipes to reach rooftops and other elevated areas; she can also use a slingshot to knock out lights and distract guards. Sebastian can swim and put guards to sleep with a chokehold.
Unlike some other stealth-oriented games that allow players more leeway in how they can complete objectives, the challenges in Eriksholm come across as discrete puzzles that merit specific solutions. The creative director for Swedish studio River End Games, Anders Hejdenberg, notes that the game's reception has largely been split between those who enjoy its highly structured gameplay and those who wish for something more freewheeling.
Hejdenberg, who credits the original Thief: The Dark Project (1998) with nurturing his long-standing interest in the stealth genre, said the game's rigorously choreographed gameplay was an intentional response to the chaos of some other stealth games. To illustrate, he cited his own experience with the Dishonored series, in which he would feel frustrated after carefully leaping from a rooftop only to encounter unexpected contingencies.
'Can't we just manufacture it so that it's like a puzzle where you have to figure it out, but when you do, you can do that perfect execution of every step and then come out perfectly clean?' Hejdenberg wondered.
That orderly structure, Hejdenberg said, also allowed the team to embellish the experience with custom dialogue, reactions and animations. 'You can get it to just feel much more alive,' he said.
The game's bold art direction evokes something of a model railroad aesthetic, which reminds one of the tremendous flair for architectural woodwork in Nordic countries. Hejdenberg noted that working on a miniature scale with an isometric perspective let the small team produce much more detail and variation than a first-person game.
Eriksholm also makes splendid use of its top-down perspective, which serves a pragmatic function for Hejdenberg. 'It's very difficult,' he said, 'to have a perfect kind of puzzle execution without seeing all the pieces.' – ©2025 The New York Times Company
( Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream was reviewed on the PlayStation 5 Pro. It is also available on the PC and Xbox Series X|S.)
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
