A stealth game where the city itself is the antagonist

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream wants you to feel the city before you understand it. River End Games sets its stealth adventure in a fictional Nordic capital modeled on early-1900s Scandinavia, and the first hour is mostly atmosphere: wet cobblestones, gaslight, a quarantine nobody is talking about honestly. The game came out in July 2025 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, and reached Nintendo Switch 2 in December 2026. It holds an 8.2/10 critic aggregate across five outlets, and that number is about right.

Trailer, via Nordcurrent Labs.

Hanna Escapes the Raid on Cutter’s Hill

You play Hanna, a young orphan who survives the Heartpox — an infectious plague that causes skin rashes and eventually cardiac arrest — and wakes into a city in decline. Trade has dried up under a Heartpox quarantine. Her brother Herman goes to work one day and does not come back. When police raid the rundown Cutter’s Hill district to take Hanna in for questioning, she escapes by stowing away on a train. No charges follow; the game never returns to the raid as a legal matter, only as the thing that pushed her out of the district.

That opening is Eriksholm at its best. The city is built from factions and shortages, and River End Games treats the quarantine as a material fact rather than a backdrop. Prices, patrols and locked doors all trace back to it.

Alva, Sebastian and the Gang of Child Thieves

Eriksholm begins with Hanna alone. As the story moves, two allies become playable: Alva, a Robin Hood-like figure who runs a gang of child thieves Hanna and Herman once belonged to, and Sebastian. Once all three are unlocked, you can swap between them at any time and use them together.

Each has distinct tools. Hanna crawls through vents. Alva climbs drain pipes. Sebastian swims. Objectives often have multiple solutions, and levels can be re-explored for collectibles, so the roster is not decoration — it is the puzzle design.

if a character is spotted, the game restarts shortly before that moment

That reset rule is the whole stealth loop in one sentence. It is forgiving in a way that keeps you moving instead of save-scumming, and it makes the isometric camera, which you can freely move to survey the environment, feel like a genuine tool rather than a compromise.

Hanna Falls Into the Shaft at Green Rock

The mid-game detour to the Green Rock mine, where Herman worked, is where the systems get tested. Hanna recovers her old blowgun from Alva and heads in. Inside, she runs into smugglers trying to negotiate an alliance with Alva to move goods into Eriksholm, where quarantine demand has made them valuable. Herman is not there. Hanna falls into a shaft and is trapped until Alva pulls her out.

It is a good sequence and a fair summary of the game’s rhythm: talk, sneak, fall, regroup. The mine also points toward Baron Patrick Dahl’s remote island, where the gang reports Herman has been taken — the moment Eriksholm stops being a missing-person story.

Rosmark Is Hostile to the Sakhin

The wider frame is the Kingdom of Rosmark, in the middle of an Industrial Revolution and openly hostile toward the neighboring Sakhin people. Hanna, Alva and Sebastian get pulled into that conflict until they become symbols of change. The game is not subtle about this, and it does not need to be. The city’s decline and the state’s cruelty are the same story.

What the game does well is scale. Eriksholm is a sprawling city, but the camera keeps you close to the streets, and the stealth stays grounded in sightlines and timing rather than spectacle.

The Three-Character Structure Takes Too Long

The roster takes time to pay off. Early hours are thin, and the game leans on Hanna’s search longer than the mechanics can carry. The isometric view, for all its flexibility, sometimes hides the exact thing you need to see, and a restart-on-detection rule is only fun when you understand why you were seen.

The plot also stacks its reveals quickly in the back half. Heartpox, the quarantine, the smugglers, Rosmark’s hostility toward the Sakhin, Baron Dahl’s island — each is introduced cleanly, but together they crowd the final act.

Release Schedule

The Switch 2 version arriving roughly a year and a half after the others is the odd note. It is a good fit for a handheld, but it is late.

What Eriksholm Gets Right

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream is a confident stealth game with a real sense of place and a cast worth swapping between. The Cutter’s Hill escape, the Green Rock mine and the three-way puzzle design are the parts that matter; the crowded finale is the noise. River End Games built a city that feels governed by its own rules, and that is rarer than the genre usually manages.

2025 game releases · Eriksholm The Stolen Dream · isometric stealth · Nintendo Switch 2 · River End Games · stealth game review