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.
Eriskholm: The Stolen Dream reviewDeveloper: River End GamesPublisher: Nordcurrent LabsPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 15th July on PC (Steam, Epic), PS5, Xbox Series X/S
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.
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.