An uneven experience that shines with its beautiful dioramas, excellent performances, and strong narrative, but is ultimately held back by frustratingly rigid and prescriptive puzzle-like stealth gameplay.
Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream presents an isometric adventure that straddles the line between stealth and puzzle genres. The game’s visual presentation is a standout feature, with levels crafted as beautiful, dollhouse-like dioramas. This aesthetic is enhanced by a free-roam camera that allows for careful observation of enemy patterns, a crucial element for planning. The narrative is delivered through strong voice performances and subtle writing, avoiding heavy exposition and instead weaving its story organically through character interactions and environmental details.
Players control a trio of characters, each with a very limited and specific set of abilities that must be used in concert to overcome obstacles. One character can induce sleep, another creates distractions, and the third provides physical strength. Their movement skills are similarly specialized, allowing them to navigate different parts of the environment. This design choice forms the core of the gameplay loop, requiring players to switch between them to solve specific environmental challenges.
However, the experience is defined by its extreme rigidity. While positioned as a stealth game that should encourage creativity, it functions more as a linear puzzle box with one-and-only-one solution for most encounters. This prescriptive nature often leads to frustration, as success demands pixel-perfect timing and a strict adherence to a predetermined path. Any deviation results in immediate failure, undermining the satisfaction typically found in creative problem-solving and making the moment-to-moment gameplay a test of patience rather than skill.
