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The Star
08-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
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.
Metro
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster PS5 review - the horrors of AI
One of the best PC games of the 90s has been remastered for consoles, as Nightdive Studios gives the sci-fi horror sandbox a well-deserved makeover. Ken Levine is an influential, but increasingly forgotten, figure in video games. Starting his career working on Thief: The Dark Project at Looking Glass, he went on to co-found Irrational Games, which made System Shock 2, before leading development of the BioShock franchise. As CVs go, his is not short of highlights, and while the immersive sim genre he helped invent never quite found mainstream appeal, players who enjoy it can be almost fanatical about it. Levine is set to return with the upcoming game Judas, but meanwhile remaster masters Nightdive Studios have been working on keeping his System Shock legacy alive, with a full remake of the first title in 2023. That stopped short of the more ambitious reboot they'd intended in their Kickstarter campaign, but its generally warm reception was enough to ensure the sequel would get similar treatment. System Shock 2 was originally released in 1999, and while Nightdive's aspirations for its 25th anniversary edition once again had to be scaled back – and released a year late – it is finally here. As such, it provides a fascinating window into gameplay that helped shape the current generation, not to mention Half-Life 2, which came out five years later and most certainly owes it more than a nod. Set 42 years after the events of System Shock, you're a solider aboard the UNN starship Von Braun, waking from hyper sleep to find the place overrun by zombie-like human-parasite hybrids, deranged psionic lab monkeys, and killer robots. Your job is to figure out what happened and try and make your way through the carnage to survive. Once again, you find yourself pitted against corrupt AI, SHODAN, but this time you also have to contend with the Von Braun's rogue computer, Xerxes, and in a foreshadowing of BioShock's structure, a single human survivor, Dr Janice Polito, whose disembodied voice issues instructions and rewards from afar. Her vocal delivery is wonderfully cynical, calmly dismissing the ghosts of the recently deceased crew members you occasionally see, as 'self-hypnotic defects', telling you not to let them distract you from the tasks she's assigned you. It's a compelling set-up and prepares the stage for a game where every single word counts. The audio logs that deliver the majority of the game's lore also contain essential tips and passwords to open doors. Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. It means you're always paying close attention to everything that's going on, which helps emphasise the profoundly unsettling atmosphere. Along with the noises and occasional explosions of the decaying UNN Von Braun, the game's fast drum and bass theme music is so jarring it adds to an overriding sense of wrongness. You'll also find the hybrids who continually try and kill you apologising as they do so. 'Sorry', they say, and 'Run', as they lay into you with guns and iron bars. Just as alarming are the lab monkeys, their lurid purple brains exposed through their trepanned skulls, multitudes of whom you'll need to beat to death with a spanner. The more you notice, the more disquieting it is. It makes Nightdive's choice to add four-player co-op with cross-play pretty baffling. For a game so dependent on its sense of creeping dread and the need to dwell on occasionally subtle clues in its environments, adding the knockabout fun that automatically occurs when two or more people get together in a first person shooter seems antithetical. When you're laughing it up with friends, the Von Braun becomes a playground rather than the intended retro-futuristic haunted house. It does help offset the difficulty though, which has in no way been dumbed down from the original. Fights are frequent and often deadly, ammo and medical supplies are scarce, and the packets of crisps and soft drinks you find only heal a single hit point. It's just as well every section of the ship has its own regeneration room, where you respawn after dying, and once you unlock the key to surgical tables that heal you free of charge, you discover things aren't quite as brutal as they initially appear. What really impresses though, are the systems that make up its sandbox. For example, another new addition is your choice of career background, which influences the stats your character has at the start of the game. They provide the foundation for quite different builds, from the gun-toting marine to the physically weak psionic-focus of the OSA. Although inadvisable for a first play through, once you work out which psi powers work best, by the mid-game some of them can become comically over-powered. The downside of the latter approach is that you'll regularly have to navigate the game's over-engineered menus. Finding and selecting a new psionic power is a faff when you're standing in an empty room. In combat, since menus don't pause the action, it's a shortcut to getting yourself battered to death by mutants. Its insistence on mapping the stand-still-and-lean-around-corners button to the one most first person games use to sprint, is similarly inhumane. More Trending Graphically, and in keeping with its status as a remaster rather than a remake, things have been polished instead of reinvented. Cut scenes are much sharper looking, as are enemies, guns and scenery, but they all still have the unmistakable low-poly blockiness of the late 1990s. The most important thing though, is that what made the game such a landmark in the first place is still entirely present. That includes its labyrinthine level design. You eventually discover that sections generously loop back on themselves, creating shortcuts after long and gruelling periods of exploration, and that you can safely dump spare inventory items in the lift that acts as a bridge between those vast floors. That doesn't prevent each new area you discover from feeling genuinely intimidating though. Despite moments of mechanical clunkiness, and the occasional odd design decision, System Shock's 25th Anniversary Remaster is a reminder of how much sophistication was possible even with pre-millennial technology. It's still utterly engrossing to play, and with so many different possibilities to experiment with, invites multiple playthroughs. This is a sensitively made and bug free remaster that should delight devotees of the 90s original and curious newcomers alike. In Short: A meticulous and polished remaster of the classic sci-fi survival horror, which retains the original's atmosphere and complexity while adding new mod cons, most of which enhance the experience. Pros: Level design that feels fresh and refined even today. Wonderfully dark ambience and environmental storytelling. Systems that allow for an inspiring variety of character builds. Cons: Very difficult compared to most modern games. Four-player co-op is fun but annihilates all hint of atmosphere. Menus remain a headache to navigate. Score: 8/10 Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, and PCPrice: £23.99Publisher: Nightdive StudiosDeveloper: Nightdive Studios (original: Looking Glass Studios and Irrational Games)Release Date: Out now (PC), 10th July 2025 (consoles) Age Rating: 16 Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: The 10 best summer video games to play if you're missing the heatwave MORE: Halo team promises 'official scoop' on series' future later this year MORE: Fans call Steam Summer Sale 2025 'mid' but there's a reason it seems so bad
