Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream PS5 review – the best-looking indie game ever

A new indie developer makes an impressive debut with a Commandos-esque strategy puzzle game that features some truly jaw-dropping visuals.

As we’ve all known for some time, ‘There is nothing new under the sun’. To give you an idea of just how long, that quote comes from King Solomon, as reported in the Bible. It’s still true today of course, and while it’s near impossible to make something genuinely, entirely original, it’s perfectly feasible to create a brand new remix of ideas that are already in circulation.

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream is an adept blend of existing video game ideas that do indeed manage to create something satisfyingly unusual. It’s a dramatic, story driven stealth game that’s viewed from an isometric perspective. That means while your character is hunkered down to avoid the gaze of policemen, guards, or riflemen you can scan the area to plan your next move.

It also gives you time to admire scenery that’s one of the game’s truly standout features. Set in the fictitious Kingdom of Rosmark, in an era that looks roughly equivalent to Europe just before the First World War, the scenery and architecture are stunning to look at. Drawn in immaculate detail with endless little touches, its cutaway interiors are like peering into a living doll’s house.

It’s living, because business in the city of Eriksholm carries on around you, letting you eavesdrop on conversations and observe little incidents from citizens’ everyday lives as you creep past, behind or above them. Along with written notes and collectible advertising brochures you find, it adds texture, lore, and plot foreshadowing, to go with the exquisite set design.

You quickly find out that people have been dying of heartpox – a disease that kills most of its sufferers – while a distant war has been creating economic turmoil, as has the shift from sail to steam power that’s left many without work. Starting in the home of Hanna and Herman, orphaned siblings trying to make their way in a harsh world, Hanna’s soon on the run from police who, for unknown reasons, want to arrest her brother.

Making your way across rooftops and through back alleys, you get a swift lesson in applying the game’s stealth tactics. Along with familiar vision cones, which only appear when there’s a danger of being seen, enemies also draw an extending dotted line towards your character. When it hits them, you’ve been spotted.

It works well, giving easily understood graphical feedback on your potential detection, something you can avoid with judicious use of cover and nearby distractions. Those include flocks of birds, which attract guards when they flutter away en masse. That gives away your position, although later you learn to use it to deliberately distract groups of guards, letting you sneak away while they investigate.

As you progress from Hanna’s home district via the old mines, and eventually to the posher neighbourhoods and mansions of Eriksholm society, there’s a heartening variety of stealth puzzles to solve. You’ll find more guards to deal with, and to help with that you’ll regularly be controlling two and later three protagonists, swapping amongst them while using their individual special moves to pick your way past danger.

Hanna has a blowpipe she uses to silently tranquillise enemies, while her old boss, Alva – a Fagin-like figure with a heart of gold – can throw pebbles to attract guards’ attention, averting their gaze. Finally, hulking family friend, Sebastian can walk up behind enemies and choke them into unconsciousness. They also have their own traversal skills. Sebastian can swim, Alva climbs drainpipes, and little Hanna can crawl through vents. You’ll be needing all those skills, and in varying combinations.

At this point you’re probably thinking this is just a clone of Commandos and other similar games, like Desperados, Shadow Tactics: Blades Of The Shogun, and Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. But while that is clearly the primary influence, Eriksholm is much more a straight puzzle game than it is a sandbox style strategy title. At the beginning there’s a certain amount of leeway in how you deal with situations but by the end it’s made clear this is actually a linear puzzle adventure.

Another impressive achievement for Eriksholm is the incredibly detailed facial animation. Even in a triple-A game this level of authenticity would be impressive, but here it’s astounding, and is complemented by excellent voice-acting. The scenes where conversations are viewed from an overhead isometric view, rather than a more characterful close-up, feel less involving as a result but you can really see where the budget was spent.

It’s also fair to say that while it’s well acted, the plot ends up accidentally absurdist. When Hanna, a teenage orphan in a recently industrialised society, is implausibly called on to help platoons of soldiers take objectives and is later allowed to dictate the fate of the city’s ruler and by extension the entire nation, suspension of disbelief falters.

The action stealth puzzles and the gorgeously presented dioramas in which they’re set remain stunning throughout, though. Working out how to make your way past groups of armed sentries, when all you have is a blowpipe and the odd tossed pebble makes for superbly realised tests of tactics and timing.

The segue into more complex puzzles, that only have a single very specific solution, can seem disappointing, but that’s just the game revealing its true colours and it probably wasn’t wise to imply otherwise at the beginning.

Nevertheless, if you can accept its structure it’s a fantastic dozen or so hours of stealth, aided by sensible design choices. Characters auto-sneak when there are enemies present, so you won’t have to keep remembering to toggle crouch, and checkpoints are generous to a fault, rewarding rather than punishing repeated experimentation with different approaches.

This is the first game from new Swedish developer River End Games and an exceptionally promising start. From its technical prowess to the performance capture to the jaw dropping work by their art department, it’s constantly impressive. More importantly it’s also absorbing to play, its puzzles proving clever and rewarding to solve. We look forward to seeing what they come up with next and hope very much that Microsoft doesn’t decide to buy them.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £32.99
Publisher: Nordcurrent
Developer: River End Games
Release Date: 15th July 2025
Age Rating: 16

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