The Lord of the Rings: Gollum lacks the personality of Tolkien’s epic

One thing you can’t say about J.R.R. Tolkien’s orcs is that they lacked personality. Tolkien’s orcs were not the generic goons of generic fantasy. They are hulking and dimwitted. The Lord of the Rings. No orc shouted “Meat’s on the menu, boys!” in the books, but Peter Jackson’s trilogy was right on the mark.

The game was on my mind The Lord of the Rings : Gollum, Daedalic Entertainment’s new LotR-inspired action-adventure. Soon after finishing the tutorial for Gollum, I had been captured by Sauron’s ringwraiths (canon), tortured (canon), and thrown in the slave pit of Mordor (canon, not a spoiler!). A hunched and armored orc was yelling at me — Gollum — to get out of my cell and follow a line of slaves to a black iron elevator. He was a hulking, dimwitted goon, in a big stone-and-jagged-metal room, with a spooky lady in the center chanting, “The Eye sees all! The Eye knows all!”

The only thing I can do is walk up to his legs, and continue doing so for as long it makes me happy. He would just emit another NPC bark — like “Get moving, slave!” — and harmlessly whip his arm through his single animation again. What little bits of personality did I find in the early hours? GollumThe majority of the photos I took myself.

Image: Daedalic Entertainment/Nacon

The legs could go on forever. You can also find out more about the following:NPCs in the room including the scary lady. The orcs had some extra barks about how I wasn’t allowed near her, but there was absolutely nothing to actually stop me from wandering. In any room I entered, I was able to run into an orc at any time. I could jump up and down. It was something I would do to an orc beastmaster who threatened me with feeding his monsters. I could have done it to the minemaster who called me an insignificant digger.

As I carried Gollum around the room, I was always trying to find out if anybody would react to my snide antics. No one did. Instead, I had to buckle down and do what the NPC barks told me to do, a set of what I’m gonna call “slave tasks.”

The areas looked a little different but, mechanically speaking, there was only one way to get around. Sometimes I sneaked around the area. Sometime I climbed. I sometimes raced to beat a clock. If I ever lost track of the path, I could press a trigger button to activate “the Gollum Sense,” which turned the world grayscale and displayed some bright orange wisps moving in the direction I was supposed to have chosen, as if Daedalic had a lack of confidence in the game’s environmental signposting.

Eventually, I dutifully walked Gollum into his cell and dutifully pressed X to go to sleep, thinking that after one day of slave tasks, surely there’d be a cutscene speeding the game along. Unfortunately, the following day I had to repeat my journey to the same lift (no scary lady) and walk through the same hall where other slaves spat me on through a grated.

What I learned from My Time with Gollum The game was divided neatly into three sections: traversal challenges (or crawling, really), a simulation of walking, and some dialogue options. Daedalic has promoted the game as a chance to really get inside the fractured mind of the lowliest victim of Sauron’s cruelty. Daedalic may have applied the Smeagol/Gollum concept to more complex choices in the future than I experienced during my approximately two hour experience.

Image: Daedalic Entertainment/Nacon

The dialogue I heard was casual. Gollum seems to be resting on an interpretation of Gollum’s “personalities” that rings false to Tolkien’s writing. It seems that Tolkien has a different interpretation of the “personalities” of Gollum. The Lord of the Rings, it’s not that Gollum is bad and Smeagol is a sweet wittle baby what never done did any wrong. Smeagol is simply a passive and craven voice, seated in tandem with Gollum’s violent and manic one. Sam called him “Slinker and Stinker,” after all, not “the Nice One and Stinker.”

What is the easy answer to The Lord of the Rings : Gollum is to dismissively ask, “Out of the whole Lord of the Rings, why would you make a game about Gollum?” But one can conceive of any number of ways to make a great video game about Gollum. I’d at least check out a goofy Gollum fishing game for mobile! I’d 100% an Goose GameEnjoy a romp with the main beats in. The Lord of the Rings. I’d look up strategies for a deck-builder “riddle” game where you play against lost orcs that wander down to your pool and eventually the final boss, that cheater Bilbo Baggins.

A better question is: “Why did you make You can also find out more about this by clicking here. video game about Gollum?” If you’re gonna make a simulation game about a Wretched Creature in a Wretched Situation, it’s either got to be meaningful and immersive, or it’s gotta have a Heeheehoohoo Factor. According to trailers and some hints during the early hours of Gollum, I know that there’s gameplay on the other side of Mordor in store. But the lack of personality has already sealed my save file’s doom (doom, drums in the deep). I’ve seen these orcs before; I’ve seen this Mordor before. It’s a version of Middle-earth played utterly straight, but without the creativity or flexibility to maintain immersion.

I wasn’t just imprisoned in a cell by orcs. A game made me find the dog tags of eight slave corpses buried in mines to continue the “not-slave” part. Frodo might have been able to keep going because of the memory that strawberries were there, but now I just need to turn the game off.

The Lord of the Rings : Gollum Released on 25 May on Nintendo Switch and Xbox One. Daedalic Entertainment gave us a code to download the pre-release version of the game on PS5. Vox Media is affiliated with other companies. Vox Media can earn affiliate commissions, but this does not affect editorial content. Find out more about affiliate links. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.