Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream Reshapes the Stealth Genre - gamescom 2024

Before gamescom 2024, there were several games announced at the Summer Game Fest hosted by Geoff Keighley. One of the games that caught my attention the most was Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream. And it was for a very simple reason – the visuals looked absolutely stunning. At first, I thought it was another AAA game from a major publisher, but it turned out to be a stealth action game from a small Swedish studio based in Gothenburg – River End Games – and they’re essentially reshaping the genre.

Up until recently, the biggest player in the stealth tactics field was German studio Mimimi Games. They made several much-beloved titles but had to close up shop because of rising development costs and not enough revenue. You’d think this would entail it’s all doom and gloom for the genre, but the recent release of Sumerian Six by Artificer means that there still is a healthy interest. But River End Games and Nordcurrent Labs aren’t just going to simply release just another game in the genre – they’re reshaping and refocusing it.

Stealth tactics games aren’t exactly plentiful or mainstream enough to be at the forefront of gaming discourse, but many of them are rightfully considered to be cult classics. But people are mainly playing and praising them for gameplay and mechanics. Stealth tactics games are essentially real-time puzzles that activate all those strategic neurons in our brains. Eriksholm is maintaining all that but also doing what Hades did to the roguelite genre – adding a compelling narrative.

River End Games’ creative director Anders Hejdenberg explained to me that this is a narrative adventure first and foremost, and this permeates every element of this game. One of the main goals for the developers was to make sure that the enemies never feel like just stupid dummy obstacles – they’re all characters in their own right. During the small showcase, every level had enemies interacting with each other, exhibiting personal quirks or behaviors, and being quite unpredictable and non-robotic, unlike the scripted adversaries we’re so used to seeing.

The entire game feels more cohesive and less of a mission-based affair, and the aforementioned is helped out by the main character interactions. While Hanna is unequivocally the main character of Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream, and her quest in search of her brother is the tale we’re following, there are more playable characters that are quite important to the story. And making them believable both in cutscenes and within the gameplay was also another focus of the dev team.

But for me, there was still an incomprehensible elephant in the room – how and why did the game look as good as it did? Eriksholm is set in a Nordic city of the same name, which, per Anders Hejdenberg’s words, is not inspired by any particular Scandinavian city or town, but picks up elements of multiple of them. Curiously, many people are supposedly somehow mistaking it for London or any other British town of the Victorian era. I specifically asked the devs to slowly go over various elements of it in slow motion just to pick up on its parts, and my confusion grew – it looked simply stunning, even the elements that you may never visit and not even see if you don’t zoom your camera on them.

But my biggest question was about the cutscene visuals—the facial expressions, the textures, the cinematography—all of it beats several—no, scratch that—most AAA titles of recent years! Naturally, I asked how they managed to achieve it and where all the money came from – surely this can’t be cheap, right?! Anders simply chuckled at my question and replied that the team creating Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream is full of industry veterans who worked on a huge variety of games, and those who are relatively new are just extremely talented, so when the team’s that good, it’s not as difficult or expensive. Whatever’s the case, they managed to do something remarkable as far as I’m concerned.

There’s no set release date for Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream yet – it will come out vaguely in 2025 on PC (through Steam and Epic Games Store), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. We, for one, simply can’t wait!