Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream
Cover art depicting Hanna
Developer(s)	River End Games
Publisher(s)	Nordcurrent
Director(s)	Anders Hejdenberg
Engine	Unreal Engine 5
Platform(s)	PlayStation 5 Windows Xbox Series X/S
Release	15 July 2025
Genre(s)	Adventure, stealth
Mode(s)	Single-player

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream is a 2025 adventure stealth game developed by River End Games and published by Nordcurrent. Set in the fictional city of Eriksholm, the game follows Hanna—a young orphan whose brother, Herman, disappears—as she embarks on a quest to uncover the truth behind his disappearance. Featuring an isometric perspective, the player can choose from three playable characters, including Hanna, as they explore the city, complete objectives and puzzles, and employ stealth to evade enemies. The game's setting is inspired by early-20th-century Scandinavian cities and architecture. Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream was released for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S in July 2025. It received generally favorable reviews from critics.

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream is an adventure stealth game with an isometric perspective that allows the player to freely move the camera to survey the environment.^[1] Initially, the game features one playable character—a young orphan named Hanna, who embarks on a quest to find her missing brother, Herman, in the fictional city of Eriksholm. As the story progresses, two additional characters—Alva and Sebastian, who assist Hanna on her journey—become playable.^[1][2] Afterwards, the player can swap between characters at any time and use them together to complete objectives, which may have multiple solutions, and solve puzzles.^[2] Each character has unique skills, tools, and weapons;^[1] for example, Hanna can crawl through vents, Alva can climb drain pipes, and Sebastian can swim. The player uses stealth to evade enemies, and if a character is spotted, the game restarts shortly before that moment.^[2] Levels can be explored repeatedly, with collectibles to find and various paths and methods available for each character.^[2][3]

Set in the fictional city of Eriksholm located in the Kingdom of Rosmark during the Industrial Revolution. The Kingdom of Rosmark is under active conflict with the Sakhins people. The game follows a young orphan Hanna, whose brother Herman disappears after stealing a valuable item, prompting a police pursuit. Hanna enlists the help of Alva and Sebastian and embarks on a quest to uncover the truth behind Herman's disappearance, as events transforms them into symbols of change.^[1][3][4]

The game starts when the police comes to raid the Waterwork place in a rundown Cutter's Hill district where the siblings live and work because Herman stole something important. Hanna escapes the police after they try to get her to the police station for interrogation. It is revealed that the city of Eriksholm is currently in decline due to the lack of trade stemming from an infectious plague called the Heartpox. The diseases causes skin rashes to appear across the body and eventually reaches the chest area of the victims where most of the victims perish from cardiac arrest. Those that survived the fatal stage of the disease would feel better but only to succumb to extreme stress and anxiety until they fall into a coma and dies after that due the disease ravages the heart of the victims, causing the lack of oxygen to the brains. Hanna is one of the few who survived the plague. After escaping Cutter's Hill, Hanna enlists the help of Alva, a Robin-hood like figure and a head of a gang of thieves that Hanna and Herman were once part of with Herman being the best member. Hanna recovers her old blowgun from Alva and heads to the Green Rock mine where Herman works to find him. Within the mine, she encounters the group of smugglers whom try to negotiate an alliance with Alva to smuggle goods in Eriksholm due to the high demands for goods from the effect of the quarantine. She eventually falls into a mine shaft and is trapped until Alva comes and rescue her. Together, they escape the mine and evade the police led by Captain Lander not before Hanna tranquilized Lander on their way out. Alva's gang informs them that Herman has been captured and sent to a remote island by Baron Patrick Dahl who owes a large agricultural and slave-trading business in Eriksholm.

To get to the island, they enlist a help of a smuggler and ex-cuisse ship liner worker named Sebastian to get there and meet his contact, Donovan who can guide them to Herman. However, when they reach Donovan, he calls it quit due to the security is suddenly tightened up due to the arrival of a Colonel Lindh from Pan Oceanic Company. However, after much persuasion, Donovan reluctantly agrees and goes to get the key to prison cell from his fellow worker Olaf. After snatching the key, Donovan eavesdrops the conversation between the Baron and Colonel Viktor Lindh, a representative of Pan-Oceanic Company. Lindh comes to the island to get Herman and threaten the Baron to comply or else the Eriksholm's mayor, Hansen would come to get Herman himself. Lindh then reveals that Hansen would have the Baron's head if he screwed up. Donovan comes and gives the key to Hanna and Alva and instructs them to go through the pipeline to reach the cell of Herman. After they reach Herman, he reveals that he hid the stuff he stole before being captured but they intercept by the prison guard. Hanna managed to knock out a guard with her blowgun but the second guard dodges the attack and proceed to fight Hanna, Alva and Herman. Despite Hanna manages to knock out the second guard, Herman is stabbed in the abdomen and dies before he could reveal what he stole and the location of the stuff. With Herman dies, the Baron was executed by Hansen for his failure.

Overcoming with the grief, Hanna determines to finish what Herman started and Alva and Sebastian come with her to help. She makes sure that Hansen would not get what he wants after what he did to Herman. Hanna reveals that she knows where Herman hid the stuff, which is the Evergreen South train station as they often used it as the place to hide stuffs during their time in Alva's gang. To get there, they need to go through Willbrook district, a district of the upper-class, where they can be spotted instantly by the city guards due to their lower-class appearances. After they reach the station, Hanna manages to reach the sibling secret hideout on top of the station and manages to find Herman's bag that contains the stuff he stole. As she tries to leave, Colonel Lindh appears and tells her that he was her ally and he was trying to help Herman all along. Lindh asks Hanna to let him explains but Hanna brushes it off and leaves. Back in the hideout, it is then revealed that Herman stole a box contained the cure for the Heartpox and Herman did steal a vial in the past to cure Hanna. Herman stole the vials to sell for huge profit so he and his sister could have a better life somewhere else. Furthermore, the box is meant for Elizabeth Quist, a ruthless and cutthroat shipping baroness of Erksholm. Argument breaks out as Alva intends to sell the cure for the highest bidders to have the capital to benefit the downtrodden people of Cutter's Hill and involvement with Quist is too risky while Hanna wants to use the cure to get to Quist to make her talks about the whole conspiracy involved the cure. As they infiltrate Quist's mansion while she is on her way to attend the Baron's funeral, they discover that Quist is secretly dealing with the Sakhins, making her the traitor of the Kingdom of Rosmark.

The trio goes into Quist's room and confronts her. She reveals that the Heartpox medicine is for her sick nephew and Hansen has been using the cure to blackmail Quist to get her majority vote in the council of Erksholm so he can stay as mayor in the next election. Hanna gives Quist the cure in exchange for a large sums of money to Alva so she can build a better life for the people of Cutter's Hill and Hanna can get a passage to assassinate the Mayor during the funeral. As Hanna about to assassinate him with a poison dart, Lindh comes and arrests him for bribery and blackmailing as well as high treason for his shady dealing with the Sakhins. Hansen tries to deny but Lindh reveals that he raided his office and found documents support his crime. Cornered, Hansen reveals that he plans for Eriksholm to secede from Rosmark and becomes an independent city state. When the Colonel is forced to leave, Hanna comes out for the kill only to be subdued and captured. During her imprisonment, Hansen gloats that all he did is for the benefits of the people of the city but Hanna points out that he is just a power-hungry madmen in the end. Later on, Colonel Lindh and his soldiers rescue Hanna. He then reveals that Hansen not only secedes Eriksholm from Rosmark but he also in league with the Sakhins invasion force, which he would open the doorway to them to attack the capital directly. Hanna and the Colonel go separate way after Hansen's men storm their position. Hanna rescues both Sebastian and Alva from their captivity and they help the Colonel's men to reach Eriksholm's costal batteries so the Colonel can fire a warning shot at the Sakhins to stop their invasion force and shows that Hansen is no longer in control to give them the passage to invade Rosmark.

Hanna and Alva fight their way to Hansen's operation room and confronts him. Hansen justifies his treachery because he disillusioned with the corrupted and decaying political structure of Rosmark and the Sakhins can help the people of Eriksholm toward the better future. Alva rebuffs his words as the Sakhins would massacre them instead. At the same time, the Colonel and his men manage to seize the batteries and repel the Sakhins. Not wanting to be killed by Hanna's poisoned dart, Hansen let himself be arrested and trialed for treason but Hanna unwilling to him get his way and ready to kill him. However, Hanna then suggests handing Hansen to the Sakhins so he could be subjected to far worse fate for making a fool out of them and since he has committed treason, he is no longer Rosmark citizen. Hansen protests that the Sakhins would not buy in to all of this fiasco before he is escorted out by the Colonel for his arrest.

With Quist's money, Alva builds a shelter for homeless and orphans named after Herman in his honor. Hanna rides the train to Apple Garden like she and her brother dreams about.

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream was developed by River End Games, a studio consisting of up to 19 members,^[2][5] including veteran AAA developers who previously worked on Battlefield, Little Nightmares, Mirror's Edge, and Unravel. The game's setting is inspired by early-20th-century Scandinavian cities and architecture, notably Gothenburg—where the studio is based—as well as Stockholm and Malmö, Sweden.^[1][2][3] Initially, the developers established the game's backstory and populated it with characters; subsequently, they selected their favorite characters and developed individual narratives for them.^[2]

When the studio began pre-production, it planned to use either Unreal Engine 5 or Unity. However, since Unity had not yet implemented physically based rendering at that moment, River End felt that Unreal Engine would be the "natural choice". Initially, the team employed proprietary face-scanning technology that produced "really good" results, although the process was described as "very slow and tedious". Eventually, the developers adopted Epic Games' MetaHuman technology to transfer actors' facial performances to character models, deeming it "an extremely useful tool" for their small team. For performance reasons, the studio used "baked lighting" while relying on Unreal Engine's Lumen lighting technology for pre-rendered cutscenes.^[6]

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream was announced at the Future Games Show in June 2024.^[3] It was released on 15 July 2025 for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S.^[7] The game's soundtrack was also released as a DLC on the same day for additional cost^[8].

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream received "generally favorable" reviews from critics, according to review aggregator Metacritic.^[9][10] OpenCritic determined that 85% of critics recommended the game.^[11]

• Official website