Eriksholm The Stolen Dream review - a stealth game just like any other

Think of a stealth game, and an image of its protagonist quickly takes shape; they're surrounded by tremendous danger, equipped with a limited arsenal, and have to stay crouched in the shadows to avoid death. Such trappings go back to the original '87 Metal Gear, since they're so effective at conjuring the heady thrills of overcoming unlikely odds. In these games, you're pilfering valuables and side-stepping carefully laid traps. You're sniping at enemies with scant ammo. You're avoiding detection from would-be captors under the guise of darkness.

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream borrows heavily from these stealth game traditions, its characters making ample use of their environments to sneak their way out of troublesome situations. Initially these exploits feel familiar and thrilling, allowing you to ease into its rhythm swiftly. As a street urchin named Hanna, you narrowly escape the city guards' crosshairs after they storm your home in search of your brother, Hermann. Crawling into a ventilation shaft to avoid being hauled in for questioning, you then creep your way through the dimly lit corridors and winding streets of Eriksholm. Your capricious brother is nowhere to be found, but Hanna doesn't find this too surprising; you get the sense that he's prone to committing misdemeanors.

Yet it's also this familiarity that makes The Stolen Dream feel unfortunately derivative. Take the first chapter, which is largely about Hanna skulking around incompetent, patrolling guards in town, who march about in pre-determined routes. The age-old trick of slipping through these paths at the right time, while avoiding the guards' line of sight, still applies here. You can take cover behind crates, or stay in the shadows till it's time to move. Then there are some environmental obstacles, which can serve as distractions when needed; flocks of birds nestle at specific spots, and metal grates reverberate with a loud clang when stepped on. Meanwhile, getting spotted by a guard is an immediate game over, but frequent, automatic saves mean the game reloads to mere minutes - or even seconds - from your last blunder. While this feature allows you to freely experiment with different ways to avoid detection, this also effectively eliminates the tension of these encounters. After all, if one approach doesn't work, you're just a few seconds away from trying again. This feels all the more incongruent when you're playing as a poor, young protagonist who's susceptible to the city's squalid conditions.

Eventually, Hanna gets a blowgun that puts guards to sleep, but you'll have to aim your shots strategically, since the darts need a few seconds to take effect. And the bodies? You'll have to hide them, of course. This is the blueprint behind The Stolen Dream: evade guards (and, in later chapters, other bumbling groups of ne'er-do-wells) from the safety of darkened passages, conceal any bodies, and move on to the next checkpoint. Rinse and repeat. Even though these stealth puzzles can be satisfying to complete at times, they're also routines that other stealth games have done before - and with greater technical prowess and ideas.

That said, subsequent chapters introduce elements that attempt to deviate from this formula. In one level, Hanna has to decipher scribbles in an abandoned mine to traverse its labyrinthine tunnels. However, these marks aren't difficult to make sense of, and any failure simply leads to a game-over scene and a quick return to form. Hanna also meets and travels with another character named Alva, a Robin Hood-esque leader of a gang of young thieves, with her own set of abilities. Unlike Hanna, Alva has a slingshot that's useful for snuffing out certain light sources and creating brief diversions against guards. Eventually, a third playable character is also introduced. Getting past some sections means swapping among the three of them, since some of these routes will be inaccessible without the use of their abilities. It's a nifty gimmick that adds a challenging layer to the game's puzzles, but The Stolen Dream barely builds upon this dynamic. In these later levels, obstacles continue to serve as an extension of earlier puzzles, without offering any means to solve them in a creative or transgressive way.

One particular puzzle exemplifies this lack of inventiveness. There's a rudimentary cargo lift in the mines that requires an additional amount of weight to descend. Crates of equipment and smuggled goods abound, but it turns out that the only way to increase this load is for Hanna to put a single guard to sleep, and then drag his limp body to the lift, all while evading other patrols.

These puzzles may feel underdeveloped, but even more disappointing is The Stolen Dream's tale. It tries to set up a grand Dickensian narrative set in the Nordic city of Eriksholm, centered around the tight-knit relationship between Hanna and Hermann. Yet there are very little emotional stakes at play; Hermann is barely embroiled in Hanna's escapades, and her motivations beyond finding her brother are largely missing, making her a pretty unsympathetic heroine. At one point, I even forgot why I was looking for Hermann in the first place. Handwritten notes and vintage postcards - tidbits that serve as exposition and easter eggs to discover - feel somewhat untethered to the story, as if inserted in the final hour as another bit of busywork for hardened completionists to hunt down. Then there's The Stolen Dream's tendency to introduce story beats haphazardly, its melodrama spiking whenever a character raises their voice and furrows their eyebrows woefully in a cutscene. Frustratingly, The Stolen Dream doesn't build these hooks up in any meaningful way, reducing its scenes to mere diorama.

In the end, The Stolen Dream feels like a patchwork of its influences that never truly delivers. Its premise is reminiscent of stealth game conventions, and its over-reliance on its brother-sister dynamic brings to mind another series - A Plague Tale - which is also based in a similar Victorian setting. Given the strength of the siblings' familial bond in Asobo's series, this invites inevitable comparisons, which ultimately makes The Stolen Dream's uninspiring sibling narrative fall all the more flat.

The Stolen Dream isn't so shabby that its familiarity breeds contempt; the ability to switch between its three characters is a good idea that might have made for an intriguing co-op experience. But by the time it presents some of its more gut-wrenching twists, the only reaction I could muster was a slight groan, its meandering plot rapidly declining alongside the prosaic puzzles.