Eriksholm Stolen Dream Review – Stealth Games Like Others

Think of a stealth game. The image of the main character becomes instantly in shape. They are surrounded by incredible danger, have limited arsenals, and must continue to lean in the shadows to avoid death. This kind of trapping is so effective in reminiscent of the whimsical thrill of overcoming unlikely odds that it returns to the original ’87 Metal Gear. In these games, valuables and side steps steal a few traps that are carefully lying on. There’s a small amount of ammunition and you’re targeting the enemy. Under the dark guise, they avoid detection from being taken prisoner.

Erixholm: A stolen dream Borrowing heavily from these stealth game traditions, the characters sneak in a way that makes full use of their environment and get out of troublesome situations. Initially, these exploits felt familiar thrilling, allowing them to quickly ease their rhythm. As a street sea urchin named Hannah, you run away slightly from the crosshairs of the city guard after raiding your house in search of your brother, Hermann. Raw into the ventilation shaft to prevent it from being transported for questions and pass through the dimly lit hallways and winding streets of Erixholm. Your whimsical brothers are nowhere to be found, but Hannah isn’t this much of a surprise. You get the feeling that he has a tendency to commit misdemeanors.

However, it is also this familiarity that makes stolen dreams feel derivative, unfortunately. Let’s take a look at the first chapter. This is primarily about Hannah running around the city’s incompetent patrol guards. The old-fashioned trick of slipping these passes at the right time while avoiding the gaze of the guards still applies here. You can hide behind a wooden frame or stay in the shadows until you move. Second, there are some environmental disorders that act as distractions when necessary. A flock of birds cuddles at a particular location, and the metal lattice echoes in large chunks when stepped in. On the other hand, being spotted by a security guard will close the game soon, but frequent autosave means that the game will be reloaded for minutes or seconds from the last mistake. This feature allows you to experiment freely in a variety of ways to avoid detection, but the tension of these encounters is also effectively eliminated. After all, if one approach doesn’t work, you’re just a few seconds away after trying again. This feels even more disharmony when playing as a poor young protagonist who is sensitive to the eerie situations of the city.

Ultimately, Hanna gets a blowgun to put the guards to sleep, but you need to strategically aim for the shot, as the darts take a few seconds to take effect. And the body? Of course, you need to hide them. This is the blueprint behind a stolen dream. Guard (and in later chapters, shelter (and other) from the safety of the dark passages), hide your body and move to the next checkpoint. Rinse and repeat. While these stealth puzzles may be happy to complete from time to time, they are also routines other stealth games have done before, which will increase your technical prowess and ideas.

However, in the following chapters we will introduce the elements that attempt to deviate from this equation. On one level, Hannah has to decipher the graffiti in an abandoned mine and cross the tunnels of that maze. However, these marks are not difficult to understand, and failure simply leads to game overscenes and a quick return to form. Hanna also travels with her own abilities and meets another character named Alba, the Robin Hood-esque leader of the young thief gang. Unlike Hanna, Alva has a pansou that helps sniff certain light sources and create a short diversion for security guards. Eventually, the third playable character will also be featured. Some of these routes are not accessible without using capabilities, so going through several sections means swapping three sections. Adding challenging layers to the game’s puzzles is a clever trick, but stolen dreams are barely built into this dynamic. At these later levels, obstacles continue to function as an extension of the previous puzzle, without providing a means to resolve them in creative or breachable ways.

One particular puzzle exemplifies this lack of originality. The mine has a rudimentary cargo lift, which requires an additional amount of weight to fall. There are plenty of equipment and boxes of contraband, but we find that the only way to increase this load is to bring one guard to sleep and then drag his limp body into the lift, avoiding other patrols.

These puzzles may feel underdeveloped, but even more unfortunate is the story of a stolen dream. It attempts to set the story of the Grand Dickensian in the Nordic city of Erixholm, centered around the close relationship between Hannah and Hermann. However, there is little emotional interest in play. Hermann is barely caught up in Hanna’s escape, with almost missing motivations beyond finding her brother, making her a rather sympathetic heroine. At one point I even forgot why I was looking for Hermann in the first place. Handwritten notes and vintage postcards – information that acts as a discovery exposition and Easter egg – feels somewhat irrelevant to the story, as if it was inserted in the final hours as another busy job of a hardened completionist cornering. Then, stolen dreams tend to accidentally introduce beats in the story, and the melodrama surges as each character speaks up and makes the eyebrows go badly in cutscenes. Annoyed, stolen dreams do not construct these hooks in any meaningful way, reducing the scene to just a diorama.

Ultimately, stolen dreams feel like patchwork of truly unreachable effects. Its premise is reminiscent of stealth game conventions, and its excessive reliance on sibling dynamics reminds me of the Plague Tales, another series based on a similar Victorian setting. Given the strength of the familial bonds between the brothers in Asobo’s series, this brings about an inevitable comparison, further flattering the story of the bad brothers of the dream that was ultimately stolen.

Stolen dreams are not so crude, and their familiarity creates light emptying. The ability to switch between three characters is a good idea that could have been created for an interesting cooperative experience. But by the time it presented some of the more devastating twists, the only response I could call was a slight moan, and its twisty plot quickly diminished along the mediocre puzzle.