Some review weeks arrive with a trumpet. This one is quieter. No single giant release is eating the room, and that makes the smaller critical disagreements easier to hear. That is useful, honestly. A score can tell you whether a reviewer landed broadly happy or broadly tired. It cannot tell you whether the thing they liked is the same thing you play games for.
So this is a small fresh review roundup with three games that sat in the review pages this week: The Drifter, Shadow Labyrinth, and Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream. None of them is trying to solve the same problem. One is a pulp point-and-click thriller, one is a strange Pac-Man Metroidvania, and one is a beautiful stealth puzzle game that looks like a tactics sandbox until it starts closing doors.
The scores are close enough to be interesting. PC Gamer gave The Drifter 70, Shadow Labyrinth 73, and Eriksholm 77. That is a narrow range on paper, but the words around those scores are doing very different work.
The Drifter review consensus: beautiful noir, messier pulp
The Drifter comes from Powerhoof, with Dave Lloyd credited alongside the studio. Powerhoof also publishes it. PC Gamer reviewed it on PC and lists the release date as July 18, with a $16.99 price point. The short version from Shaun Prescott is clean: "The Drifter is a gorgeous and moody point 'n' click adventure with impeccable art, but its pulp leanings undermine its best qualities." PC Gamer's score is 70.
That verdict tells you almost everything about the split. The praise is visual and atmospheric. The doubt is structural. Prescott spends a lot of the review on how strong the game looks before he starts pulling at the writing. He describes the setting as a down-at-heel urban sprawl, with Powerhoof's pixel art landing somewhere between noir, John Carpenter grime, and a slightly surreal painterly style. That is not faint praise. The review makes the game sound tactile, sickly, and carefully staged.
The problem, according to PC Gamer, is that The Drifter does not stay with the quieter mystery it initially promises. Mick Carter begins as a homeless drifter heading home for his mother's funeral. He is thrown into danger almost immediately, framed for murder and pulled into a conspiracy. That is strong pulp setup. The criticism is that the pulp eventually becomes too much of the point. Prescott writes that at first the game promises "a dark character study wrapped in a murder mystery," but later says it becomes more, "alas, to its detriment."
That is the useful warning if you are deciding whether to play it. If you want a point-and-click adventure with mood, texture, and grimy Australian noir, The Drifter sounds like it has plenty. If you want the opening sadness and mystery to stay grounded all the way through, the PC Gamer review suggests you may end up wishing it trusted its smaller instincts.
There is still a lot here for adventure game people. The review calls the game "a joy to behold and interact with," and it notes the usual MacGyver-style object logic that makes a point-and-click feel satisfying when it works. But this is a 70, not because the game lacks craft, but because the review sees a mismatch between its strongest mood and its louder genre turns.
Shadow Labyrinth review consensus: a good Metroidvania with an identity problem
Shadow Labyrinth is the strangest pitch of the three. Bandai Namco developed and published it, and PC Gamer reviewed it on an Asus ROG Ally. The listed release date is July 17, with a $30 or £25 price point. Abbie Stone gives it 73 and opens with a verdict that feels both fair and mildly exhausted: "A good Metroidvania trapped in the shadow of too many better ones."
The obvious hook is Pac-Man, or close enough. The game does not technically star Pac-Man in the normal sense. Your companion is Puck, a darker version of the idea, attached to an amnesiac protagonist known as Number Eight. The review has fun with how bizarre that is. It calls the game a "massive love letter to the 2D Metroidvania," then points out how strange it is to bolt that onto a grim sci-fi story full of doomed soldiers, superweapons, and monster slaughter.
What reviewers seem to agree on, at least from PC Gamer's account, is that the premise is weirder than the play. Once you have a sword, the structure becomes familiar: three-hit combos, a stun attack, dodging, enemy interrupts, corpse-chomping resources, and eventual map expansion. Stone says the game has a "solid Metroidvania core" after an overly linear opening. That matters. The concern is not that Shadow Labyrinth fails at the basics. It is that recent Metroidvanias have raised the floor. PC Gamer specifically invokes Nine Sols and Prince of Persia as games that make Shadow Labyrinth's combat feel less special by comparison.
The best part of the review is that it does not treat the Pac-Man reimagining as either a joke or a guaranteed win. Stone seems amused by the brutality, especially the idea of Puck eating corpses and turning into a giant invincible mech, but she also wants more from it. The mechanic sounds flashy without being fully woven into the moment-to-moment fighting. In other words, Shadow Labyrinth has an identity crisis in two directions. As a Pac-Man riff, it may not be strange enough mechanically. As a Metroidvania, it may not be sharp enough to escape stronger neighbors.
Still, 73 is not a dismissal. The navigation puzzles, platforming challenges, and map-reading pleasures appear to carry real weight once the world opens up. The criticism is more specific: too many industrial zones look alike, the enemy variety is limited, and the surprise combat rooms apparently start to feel familiar. That is the kind of review where the right player can read the complaints and still be interested.
If Shadow Labyrinth lands for you, it will probably be because you like the oddness enough to forgive the conventional frame. If it does not, the review makes the failure mode pretty clear: you may keep waiting for the weird Pac-Man idea to become as bold in your hands as it is in the pitch.
Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream review consensus: gorgeous, acted well, too strict
Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream is the highest-scored of the three here, but only by a few points. River End Games developed it, Nordcurrent Labs published it, and PC Gamer reviewed it on a PC with an RTX 4080, Ryzen 3700X, and 32GB RAM. The score is 77. Joshua Wolens' verdict is blunt: "Beautiful and stacked with excellent performances, but Eriksholm's stealth feels too much like being led around by the nose to reach greatness."
This is the most interesting score in the roundup because the complaint is not about quality in the usual rough-edge sense. It is about promise. At a glance, Eriksholm looks like a multi-character isometric stealth game in the lineage of Commandos, Desperados, and Shadow Tactics. That frame makes you expect a sandbox: patrols to read, abilities to combine, little crimes of improvisation. PC Gamer says that is not what this is. Wolens argues it is closer to a stealth puzzle game, where each encounter has a correct solution and the player pokes until they find it.
That sounds harsher than the score, because the review also clearly likes a lot of the craft. The presentation gets the strongest praise. Wolens calls it "a triumph of presentation if not gameplay," pointing to Unreal Engine 5 lighting, detailed animation, and strong voice work, especially among the playable trio. The setting, a pseudo-Swedish industrial city with plague, class misery, and police pressure, also seems to give the early chapters a clean emotional shape.
The key detail is Hanna, the first playable character. She is recovering from Heartpox, separated from her brother Herman, and pushed through a city where her knowledge of alleys, rooftops, neighbors, and secret paths matters. PC Gamer says those earliest chapters are the strongest narratively. That explains why the game almost works better as a directed story than as a tactics toy. When Hanna's movement through the city is about who she is and where she belongs, strict design can feel authored rather than limiting.
The trouble comes when the game's outer shape keeps suggesting freedom. A multi-character stealth game asks you, almost by genre memory, to experiment. Wolens' criticism is that Eriksholm does not really want that from you. It wants clean execution of designed answers. That can be satisfying, and the review says it often is, but it changes the fantasy. You are not outsmarting a living space. You are solving a beautiful lock.
That distinction will decide the audience. If you come in expecting Shadow Tactics, the 77 might feel generous or frustrating. If you come in wanting a polished stealth puzzle with strong performance capture and an unusually lavish look, the same review reads like a recommendation with a clear boundary.
What the three scores actually say
The funny thing about a 70, a 73, and a 77 is that they look like one mood. They are not. The Drifter sounds like the most atmospheric game here, and maybe the one with the clearest artistic identity, but its review turns on whether the writing's pulp escalation undercuts that identity. Shadow Labyrinth sounds mechanically competent and conceptually bizarre, but maybe too conventional where it should be strangest. Eriksholm sounds the most polished, and probably the easiest to admire in screenshots, but its score is held back by how tightly it controls player invention.
That is why review aggregation is useful when it stays close to the wording. Scores flatten these games into the low-to-high 70s. The reviews split them apart again.
If I were sorting them into a backlog, I would not treat Eriksholm as simply the best because it has the highest number. I would treat it as the safest choice for someone who likes authored stealth puzzles and strong presentation. The Drifter is the pick for adventure game players who care about mood and can forgive a story that gets louder than it needs to. Shadow Labyrinth is the curiosity, the one where the pitch may be enough if you already have room in your life for another Metroidvania.
That is the calmer way to use critic scores. Not as instructions, and not as a scoreboard. More like notes from people who got there first. The rest is still your journal to fill in.