Gollum has two personalities — I wish the Gollum game had any

The one thing you can’t say about JRR Tolkien’s orcs is that they lack personality. The common orc of general fantasy may be a big, dimwitted goon, but for Tolkien they were his main way of injecting humor into the darkest of moments. Lord of the Rings, Some orc shouted “Meat’s on the menu, boys!” in the books, but Peter Jackson’s trilogy was on target.

it was on my mind when i was playing The Lord of the Rings: GollumThe new LotR-inspired action-adventure from Daedalic Entertainment. immediately after completing the tutorial of Gollum, I was captured by Sauron’s Ringwraiths (canon), tortured (canon), and thrown into the slave pit of Mordor (canon, not a spoiler!). A hunchbacked and armored orc was yelling at me – Gollum – to exit my cell and follow a line of slaves to a black iron lift. He was a big, dimwitted goon in a big stone and jagged metal room, in the middle of which was a scary woman chanting, “The eye sees all! The eye knows all!

But I could push the control stick forward and walk in its legs for as long as it pleased me. He’ll just emit another NPC bark – like “Go ahead, slave!” – and harmlessly whip your arm through your single animation again. I got some semblance of personality in the first few hours of Gollum Most were those that I had provided myself.

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Image: Daedalic Entertainment / Nacon

In fact, I could walk endlessly in the feet of Any NPCs in the room including the scary lady. The orcs had some additional barking about how I wasn’t allowed near him, but nothing to really stop me from wandering off. I could run into any orc in any corner of any room in the game. I could jump up and down. I could do it with Beastmaster Orc because he threatened to feed me to my monsters. I could do it with the mine owner because he called me a worthless digger.

I did it a lot when I carried Gollum from room to room full of orcs, checking if anyone would respond to my mischievous antics. No one did. Instead, I had to buckle down and do what NPCs asked me to do, which I’m going to call “slave work”.

Superficially, these were all different, but mechanically, they all called for me to navigate an area that looked fancy, but really only had one way. Sometimes I used to steal from this area. Sometimes I climbed. Sometimes I ran against a timer. If I ever lost my way, I could press a trigger button to activate “The Gollum Sense,” which turned the world to grayscale and displayed some bright orange Wisps moving in the direction I walked. was chosen, such as Daedalic’s lack of faith in the game’s environmental signposting.

Eventually, I dutifully took Gollum to his room and dutifully pressed X to sleep, thinking that after a day of slave tasks, there would surely be a game-increasing cutscene. Unfortunately, I woke up the next day and repeated my walk to the same elevator (no scary women this time) and through the same hallway where other slaves spit on me through a grate to perform more slave actions on me. Gave.

my time with Gollum was neatly divided into traversal challenges, walking (crawling, really) simulations, and a soupcon of dialogue options. Daedalic has actually promoted the game as an opportunity to delve inside the fractured mind of the most despicable victim of Sauron’s cruelty. In my roughly two hours of experience, I suspect that Daedalic later implemented the Sméagol/Gollum dynamic thanks to more nuanced choices than the singles I encountered.

Image: Daedalic Entertainment / Nacon

But even in the more casual, less consequential dialogue choices I noticed, Gollum It seems to rest on an interpretation of Gollum’s “persona” that is mistaken for Tolkien’s writing. In Lord of the Rings, it’s not that Gollum is bad and Sméagol is a sweet little kid who never did anything wrong. Smeagol is simply a passive and compassionate tone, juxtaposed with Gollum’s violent and frantic tone. Sam calls him “Slinker and Stinker”, after all, not “The Nice One and Stinker”.

simple answer to The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is to ask dismissively, “Out of the whole of Lord of the Rings, why would you make a game about Gollum?” But one can imagine many ways to make a great video game about Gollum. I would at least see a goofy golem fishing game for mobile! i am 100% a untitled goose game-Roll through the leading beats of the genre Lord of the Rings, I’d be looking for strategies for a deck-builder “puzzle” game where you play against lost orcs that wander into your pool and eventually the final boss, that cheater Bilbo Baggins.

A better question is: “Why did you make This Video game about Gollum?” If you’re going to make a simulation game about a wretched creature in a wretched situation, it’s either got to be meaningful and immersive, or it has to have a Heeheehoohoo factor. based on the trailers and some hints in the early hours of Gollum, I know there is 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 completely straight, but without the creativity or flexibility to maintain immersion.

I wasn’t just imprisoned in a cell by orcs. I was also captivated by a game that wanted me to find eight dog tags from eight slave corpses hidden in the mines before I could move to the non-slave part of the game. Strawberry’s memory may have let Frodo through to Mordor, but I can close the game.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was released on May 25 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PS5 using a pre-release download code provided by Daedalic Entertainment. Vox Media is an affiliated partnership. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information about Play Gamez’s ethics policy here,