Disaster Report: The Lord of the Rings: Gollum (PS5)

When The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was announced, many people were utterly baffled. In this fantasy series with sword-swinging rangers, powerful wizards, and elven archers, somebody had decided to make a game based on the squalid imp of a man who seems like he struggles to even kill the fish he then eats raw. Gollum is a compelling character narratively to be sure, embodying the possible endpoint of corruption should Frodo give into the foul influence of the One Ring he has sworn to destroy, but with video games so often billed as power fantasies, the question still rang all around the internet.

 

Who would want to play as Gollum? Who even wanted this Gollum game?

 

The answer? I did.

 

J.R.R. Tolkein’s Middle-Earth is far too rich and fascinating a setting to forever be chained to action-adventure adaptations. Already we have had plenty of games where you fight as the capable heroes featured in The Lord of the Rings and as long as people care about the franchise, in time we will no doubt once again be able to control Aragorn, Legolas, Gandalf, or even the full armies of the many races of Middle-Earth. But not every video game based on the franchise need focus on defeating one group of enemies so you can then move onto the next group. There are plenty of unique genres that could benefit from a bit of Tolkein’s deeply layered fiction, and this was even where I was aiming to propose some ideas for them until I had my point proven for me. I had intended to propose a hypothetical cozy life sim set in The Shire, and yet the very day I beat The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, a trailer was released for Tales of the Shire which is exactly that.

 

A stealth game where you play as the feeble but fascinating Gollum felt like it could be interesting, especially thanks to the developers involved in the project. Daedalic Entertainment have produced plenty of narrative point and click adventures where the stories needed to shine to make the experience worthwhile. Gollum’s inner struggle between his Gollum persona that represents the corruption of the ring and his original timid Smeagol personality that languishes behind the more forceful dark side makes it easy to imagine a plot where his two sides fight for control, even if by the nature of his narrative fate it would have to be a prequel. Yes, this Gollum game could very well be a fresh way to experience Middle-Earth that could show the depths The Lord of the Rings could explore with more out of the box thinking!

Here is where I’d like to issue a formal apology for my optimism.

 

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum did not show us the rich potential of its character or an engaging approach to sneaking around the dark corners of Mordor. It did not show us why it could be fun to play as an emaciated hateful little creature in the right context, and it sometimes struggled to show us anything at all thanks to a litany of game-breaking bugs and constant crashing. Thankfully, the ship was righted in some regards, many glitches wiped away and I experienced no crashes at all during my time with it on PlayStation 5, but you can’t just patch a few holes on a sunken ship and deem it seaworthy. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum bears the water stains of a very limited set of flawed ideas, an unusual laser focus on gameplay that is tedious and hollow by design, and perhaps worse than anything else, it makes you slog through the muck and the sludge and then tickles you with the sight of what this game could have been in its later chapters. Even as the game suddenly starts getting its act together some though, it can feel like being moved from a quicksand pit to a bog. It’s better by comparison, but you’ll soon regret saying it’s not so bad when you’re picking leeches off you.

 

A SMALL AND SLIMY CREATURE

Before we begin, we should get to know our ungainly and frankly pathetic protagonist. While Gollum’s cultural impact thanks to the films has made him familiar to many, even if they know him most by his iconic yearning for his “Precious”, he is not quite the same creature we saw brought to life brilliantly by Andy Serkis in Peter Jackson’s films. Here in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum he seems to be, as shocking as this is going to sound, a bit cuter. His eyes are enormous and his irises small, making him look more like some panicked shaved gibbon that’s been thrust into the most hostile place in Middle Earth. It’s hard not to pity the guy when he’s leaning towards being Smeagol and ends up acting like a sycophant desperate for even the most meager morsel of approval.

 

In fact, throughout the story of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, everyone save for slave drivers sort of treats him like this pathetic old dog, watching him hop around on all fours, his palms slapping against stone like he’s some sort of moist toad. They are repulsed by him sure, but they can’t muster up much antipathy because it feels like kicking a puppy, albeit one that hisses at you and is secretly conspiring with his alternate personality all the time to cause trouble.

 

That alternate personality, whether you believe Gollum or Smeagol to be the truer one, does lead to one of the game’s major narrative mechanics. At times, you will be called upon to make a choice, and you must pick a side between the harsher Gollum side or the technically friendlier Smeagol side. You will need to essentially argue your case after during an internal dialogue between both personalities, the winner picking which action will be taken and in turn how the story will unfold from there.

To make things a bit more interesting, we’ll attempt to take a similar approach to judging certain elements in this game, where I will evaluate one of Daedalic Entertainment’s concepts from a more forgiving side and a harsher side and then declare a winner. I will spare us all the embarrassment of me trying to write it in-character though. The unusual vocabulary and mannerisms this character is known for that seem to fall somewhere between caveman and a child learning a second language are at least adeptly written here, I never once felt like it wasn’t Gollum or Smeagol speaking, but how effective was their dialogue with each other?

 

Smeagol: So many games offer the player a chance to make impactful choices. They’re almost always free of any input beyond selecting on a menu though, whereas this requires convincing a character to act and makes it into a gameplay challenge even. What better way to represent a character torn between two ways to behave than have him actually play out a mental debate?

Gollum: What seems like a way to make choices more meaningful just feels like an unnecessary extra step. Gollum and Smeagol are disparate enough you can easily predict how one will lean and what to say to convince the other. Rather than making the choices hard, the game tries to cover them up with a glorified minigame to make it feel like there’s more to picking your preferred option.

 

In this case, I believe…

On a basic conceptual level, games with branching narrative paths could do with more weight involved in the choices the player makes. Too often games allow you to make choices that essentially break character from how you had your avatar behave in the past, but here, trending towards Gollum or Smeagol choices actually leads to these debates starting with a point already in favor to the side you’ve been favoring. More time spent ruminating on the decision can make it feel more impactful too, and there could have been opportunities where picking a certain choice would require far more work to justify if the game wanted to make this activity more interesting.

 

But, this is The Lord of the Rings: Gollum we’re talking about. I saw the potential for it before release, and I saw the potential for this mechanic, but sadly, it’s not implemented very well at all. As the “Gollum” said earlier, it can sometimes feel like the game is dressing up a choice just to make it feel more important, but a lot of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum follows a straight path. The first choice you make is deliberately weak, one on whether you’ll chase a beetle or hide, and neither one changes the outcome of the events that follow, but it at least gets away with being more tutorial than a meaningful moment. However, from then on, it’s pretty easy to spot the narrative’s unwillingness to cave to these choices it’s asking you to make.

 

Early on, when Gollum is thrown into the slave pits, a frail man takes pity on him (get used to people taking pity on Gollum, maybe keep a running tally on how many times I use variants on the word “pity”). For some reason, beyond just helping Gollum get used to being worked to death by orcish taskmasters, he immediately figures Gollum as a good collaborator in a possible escape plan before the simpering little pale man who hisses to himself had even been there five days. While working with the frail man, there’s eventually a point you can rat him out or pin the blame on someone else, and if you do choose to go the loyal route, the narrative basically wants to put no work into making the frail man’s survival meaningful. He just stops factoring into the plot and Gollum’s escape efforts go independent. Later on he can have a man’s life in his hands, or consider how he wants to deal with a woman he’s using for his own ends, and again, no matter your choice, their fate is either sealed or essentially sealed as certain events must play out and characters have set roles. Gollum is arguing with himself for little reason, this more a window into his paranoia than a meaningful way to guide the plot.

 

This is where I usually would swoop in to defend a story that offers you choices but doesn’t bend its story out of shape to accommodate them. A good story is better than one you can throw off the rails for no good reason, and there is at least near the very end a choice that can change things heavily for pretty much just the final scenes. This is where I’d say “it’s more a way for you to customize the character’s personality than pick the plot”, and The Lord of the Rings: Gollum does do this at times just during normal chatter. A character will say something to you, and you can press left or right on the directional buttons to either answer as the surly Gollum or the skittish Smeagol. The two aren’t clear cut either, Gollum will sometimes make the better more moral choice simply because it suits his aims in getting out of a situation and back to pursuing the One Ring, while Smeagol will sometimes become selfish because he wants a happy life of less evil but sees no other means beyond taking it by force. This does add a dash of color to the character’s personality, and honestly, Wayne Forester’s vocal performance as Gollum is exceptional and even may outshine Serkis. Forester makes it clear when Gollum or Smeagol are speaking even if you don’t have the subtitles on and yet makes it so they feel like the same tormented and demented character shifting between his extremes.

 

If only Daedalic didn’t draw your attention to certain choices so much. It tries to make you consider your decisions but doesn’t give them much meaningful weight or even make the debate process particularly entertaining. You keep waiting for the time when Smeagol or Gollum is really going to give the other half a hard time, but they’re both creatures of habit whose complexity doesn’t come through during these moments. You’re not engaging with the narrative more deeply so pulling you aside and pretending you are feels fruitless and futile, especially when it’s something rather basic anyway like needing to calm down rather than making a choice that at least looked rough before you saw the consequences were not that interesting.

Luckily, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum knows where its attention instead should lie, and that’s on Gollum’s ratty little wisps of hair. For some baffling reason, in the game’s graphic settings, you cannot tinker with shadows, texture quality, anti-aliasing, v-sync, or many other standbys of modern menus. You can at least pick between prioritizing Graphics or Performance without having a look at the minutiae of how that will change the experience, but you can also toggle the hilariously named Gollum Hair Simulation feature. Not only does this seem to cause a good degree of performance problems if enabled and adjusting that was actually part of the efforts to rectify the game’s early sorry state, but it feels like such an unusual area to waste your attention on. Already it feels like the damp strands barely cling to his scalp to make him look like some sort of freshly baptized baby monkey, but it doesn’t feel like it would add much of anything to see it flowing with a touch more realism. This attention to hair isn’t universal, the frail man’s long beard for example sometimes taking on a crescent moon shape as it rigidly assumes a standard shape, and while you see long-haired elves and even the bearded Gandalf the Grey, this is again just a setting impacting Gollum’s matted seaweed strand hairdo.

 

That should be more than enough on our incredibly unlikely protagonist for now though, so let’s move onto what a good deal of the game comprises of.

 

THE DARK LABOR OF ITS SLAVES

When The Lord of the Rings: Gollum begins, you briefly get to spend some time living his sorry existence in the mountains. Hiding from a giant spider, hiding from Orcs, hiding from Nazghuls, and generally being a nervous little wreck. This pitiful existence is interrupted when the troops of Sauron catch up with him, his tie to the powerful One Ring meaning they want answers on where it went, unaware he’d lost it prior to the game in an exchange of riddles with the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins. After torturing the name out of Gollum though, they elect to throw him into the slave pits of Mordor despite the fact Sauron seems to still be mentally tormenting him to get out and retrieve that ring.

 

As I mentioned earlier, unusually quickly Gollum’s time in the pits turns towards planning an escape, albeit one that takes years to unfold. The first half of the game, five chapters of a total ten, is actually spent living out your life as a slave, and it is certainly not an enjoyable existence. However, lets take a moment and see what Smeagol and Gollum might say about the potential of being a slave in a video game could be.

 

Smeagol: Slavery is definitely a useful tool for making a player experience a narrative moment emotionally. The toil and hardships experienced while under the yoke of the orcs is not just told to us, we’re made to experience it and thus empathize with Gollum’s plight. Video games can often be criticized for not having their gameplay align with their story, so taking some time to ensure it does, even in a negative way, makes The Lord of the Rings: Gollum more immersive.

Gollum: Being a slave sucks.

Perhaps in a more generous situation someone might lean towards Smeagol, but I must also contend that The Lord of the Rings: Gollum does not do its “slavery simulation” particularly well either. I look instead to Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride, a game that I grow fonder of as more time passes, that features a section where the main character is enslaved for a long period. You are made to toil a bit during this portion of the game, doing actions that aren’t particularly interesting, but also, it’s over after you’ve had time to put yourself in your hero’s shoes. You have felt the emotion of the moment and the game moves along after that, rather than keeping you steeped in it for literally half the game like The Lord of the Rings: Gollum.

 

Daedalic Entertainment does recognize that it can’t just have you mining day in and day out at least, although some of the background slaves meant to do mining can encounter glitches like when I once encountered a pair of orcs admonishing a slave that didn’t seem to exist. Your tasks do take on different shapes, such as leading some beasts to their pens, crawling through holes to ignite explosives, and exploring the depths of the black pits for the ID tags of dead miners. The ID tag one is repeated and often just involves climbing around and avoiding bubbles of gas with odd red outlines that look more appropriate for a cartoony platformer than this grounded fantasy world, but these segments also introduce ideas like heat making you slower so it takes more time just to make it more tedious. The explosive igniting isn’t exciting, you are basically just moving about and don’t even need to pick up the pace much to outspeed the blast or gas that is released. The beast herding sounds most unique, but you can just run and if you can manage the bare minimum of not depleting your stamina it will be done quickly and without struggle. What makes it worse though must be the times it ensures you do all the slow walking to and from your cell or to work areas, the player already realizing their tasks won’t be entertaining and the crawl to actually doing them feels like far too much immersion when you already can tell pretty early on that any situation Gollum finds himself in will be pretty sad and distressing.

 

One of the funniest parts of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is that once you have finally made your escape at the halfway point, you only end up a prisoner of the elves instead for most of the rest of the plot. Yes, you shift from being locked in one place to another, although at least it’s not actual literal slavery since you’re being detained with an unusual range of freedom to explore rather than forced to work yourself to the bone. There’s definitely a nice change in scenery too, the slave pits a mix of grey and black that suits the place but makes it incredibly unappealing and drab. Some misplaced music will sometimes try to make the moments you stray near lava or technically have a time limit seem exciting, but you’re still slapping your hands and feet along to do thankless tasks, and even when the game’s villain, the Candle Man, starts making you his personal servant, you’re not going to be up to much of interest and even the moment you make a custom bird pal for yourself by influencing its egg can be hampered by the textures for the instructions just not loading.

 

There is a much more present activity in this game than slave labor though, and one that defines most every action you’ll undertake even when it’s technically a piece of some other activity.

 

WE CLIMB. WE MUST CLIMB.

Online you will hear The Lord of the Rings: Gollum described as a stealth game or something more akin to a narrative adventure, but the predominant action in a game should define its genre, and were that true for The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, that genre must be climbing. You’ll note, climbing isn’t really considered a video game genre. There are games about climbing, Jusant and GIRP come to mind, but both are using things like puzzles or difficult inputs as their appeal rather than the climbing. If you were to look at a moment of gameplay in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum though, you will most likely see our pitiful pale pipsqueak clambering on ledges, scaling vines, or doing an oddly clean wall run that puts Sonic Lost World to shame while looking more like something you’d see in the deft maneuvering of The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Yes, Gollum needs to get around, and he’s exploring many huge areas that will inevitably not allow him to just walk to destinations, especially when he’s getting into trouble or trying to get out of it. But what use is there in making so much of this game’s action center on climbing?

 

 

Well, I know two guys to ask.

 

Smeagol: Climbing rugged cliffsides and shimmying along ledges is an immersive activity. Your character is scaling up something massive and dangerous where a fall is guaranteed to be lethal, the peril meant to be palpable as you see how high up you are and become aware of how precarious your footholds can be. Sometimes you just need to traverse an area that can’t be done with ladders or ramps, so why not add the kind of scary looking clambering that you see action heroes engage with?

Gollum: Climbing in video games is almost always some sort of deception. It might look precarious, but your character isn’t in any danger since they’re magnetized to the wall and there’s no real skill involved in moving from handhold to handhold. It’s an empty way to cover up loading at times and at best is sometimes a way to cool down between sections that were actually dangerous, but if you’re climbing in a game and it doesn’t have a stamina system like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it’s probably no harder than walking from point A to point B but much slower since you need to leap and scramble.

Like in Gollum’s example, a game like Breath of the Wild can turn climbing into a tool, but if climbing is the focus in a video game, it can end up being incredibly vapid. You can see Nathan Drake or Lara Croft dangling over a chasm but sometimes it’s not even possible to fall, and even when their hands slip, it’s just a scripted moment.

 

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum decided to focus in heavily on climbing as an important part of getting around though, so you’d think it would at least avoid the familiar pitfalls of climbing in video game design. Surprisingly, so much of the climbing is entirely mindless. You see where to go, you hop to it, you climb up, you see where to go next, you hop there, and you continue on. Rarely you might have a moment where you need to shimmy along with your legs hanging down, your stamina suddenly relevant as it drains, but it’s also set so if you just keep moving you’ll make it just fine and there isn’t a danger or timing element to oppose this much of the time. In fact, there is rarely danger at all during climbing segments. At one point there’s some spiders to avoid, and at another some purple energy balls swoosh around but they just move along set paths. Most of the time, you just need to get somewhere, and the game thinks making you climb up wall after wall is a great way of filling that traversal time. Even if there’s a nominal time crunch, you don’t really need to rush and more importantly, you often can’t. You just go up the one path available to you, and while you can fall to your death technically, you’d have to mess things up to do so.

 

This is in part because Gollum is actually an incredibly magnetic creature. If there’s a ledge nearby he can grab on, he’ll go for it, sometimes to his detriment. The camera in this game is incredibly unhelpful a great deal of the time, because while you are climbing in dedicated spaces meant only for climbing, it can still struggle to get a good angle on the wiry little gremlin you’re having scale another cliff face. Sometimes you might want to jump just to get the camera away from an unhelpful zoom or an accidental focus on the wall, only for Gollum to move himself towards a ledge but not all the way, causing him to plummet to his death. Death barely sets you back much of the time, but you still definitely feel it as it technically adds more climbing to the job. You can at least fully rely on the game when the indicator to press square to do a backwards jump appears, since otherwise you might not even see that the way onward is behind you, but at the same time, the rare time climbing can be the tiniest bit interesting is when it’s not just an obvious set of objects to scale unopposed. Actually having to look around for the way onward is technically a challenge of sorts, but it’s also downtime and you’ll already find yourself yawning as Gollum scales the world around him like a squirrel with no fear of death. There is even an Insight ability you can trigger where the world greys and you see orangish swirls showing you the path onward, although sometimes it shows you the way onward is one you might not have reasonably guessed or probably forgot since the sweeping views of areas meant to show your destination go on a bit too long to remember the expected path.

 

It really doesn’t matter where you are in the story, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum will shoehorn in climbing somehow since that it’s main form of play. The elven city’s buildings have plenty of ledges for you, the forest has accommodating tree branches, and the game sure does love its mountainsides and stony walls as it will rope those in wherever it can. Early on in the slave pits and it’s all black and depressing it’s even worse that you’re doing constant climbing without much obstruction or any element to energize the task.

I really cannot overstate how much climbing you’ll do, and what’s worse, sometimes you climb over the same places again with no changes made to their layout or the stakes. While you’d think breaks from this form of unengaging empty form of traversal would always be welcome, the game can sometimes then thrust you into a segment where you’ll likely die over and over as you tangle with something new like riding atop a cart dodging things in its path or engaging with the stealth sections. Yes, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum does feature stealth, and it actually features one of the most interesting uses of climbing, because for all the straight unobstructed paths it will require you to scale to progress this adventure, it decides its stealth sections need some interesting movement options. Surprisingly often, there will be more than one way to tackle sneaking past orcs and elvish guards as Gollum gets into mischief, (the difference between them is you can’t slowly strangle the elves… or the many orcs with helmets) and taking different paths can lead to encountering different degrees of danger. For example, one path might have more patrols while another instead has a character with a crossbow who will attack you on sight rather than trying to rush over and grab you for the instant defeat.

 

 

Gollum can lurk in the shadows, able to remain completely undetected and taking on a rather striking shadowy appearance as he does so. The game’s lighting doesn’t always work out, one moment a light meant to cast Gollum in red instead turned his hair into a bright neon orange, but unfortunately like many glitches it was either gone too quick to capture or a bit mundane like when I found a random bit of air I could stand on. Some of those alternate stealth paths involve slinking around shadows effectively, but other times, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum suddenly strips away your options and instead leans on incredibly basic sneaking. Guards lie ahead, you can pick up stones to your side, you can then throw them at metal objects to make a noise and distract a guard, and then move on while he’s not looking. This is a favorite of the game designers despite it not taking much thought to execute and much like the climbing, it feels like The Lord of the Rings: Gollum will try to find itself back to this comfortable monotony eventually even when it briefly threatens you with the excitement of variety and options.

If anything lies at the core of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum’s issues, it must be the double whammy of constant uncontested climbing that does nothing to hold your interest and stealth that appears and often feels like a shallow task you rush through since its either unimaginative or wastes its potential as its alternate paths are often just another excuse for more climbing. So much else could be taken on the chin, from the occasional glitches to the weak implementation of narrative choices, and you could almost see where it could have made things more interesting like with the collectibles. There are sometimes side areas to climb to find a collectible, Gollum keeping them all somehow in the ratty gross covering he wears and unfurls on the pause screen thankfully while he’s off-screen, but sadly many of these are as basic as “a splinter”, “some metal nails” or “a bat wing” in a game where bats barely appear. They aren’t a chance to learn much more of the world and more there to tick boxes on a trophy or achievement…

 

But something strange does occur after you leave the slave pits. Something that, after hours of climbing and labor, can almost make you wonder… could this game have been good?

 

I HAVE NOT MUCH HOPE THAT GOLLUM CAN BE CURED BEFORE HE DIES, BUT THERE IS A CHANCE OF IT

The early moments of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum’s plot are as hopeless as the situation Gollum finds himself in. There’s not much of a story beyond Gollum trying to escape, characters are mostly just orcs who yell at you to get to work, and while the Candle Man and his daughter who run the place build up some intrigue, they kind of just amount to villains the game can use to be the hands of Sauron in a situation where lore-wise the big man or more famous minions can’t participate. You’re steeped in dull endless climbing, and then you escape, only to be imprisoned by the elves as mentioned before. But this second half suddenly seems to show that yes, actually, maybe, possibly… The Lord of the Rings: Gollum had potential to be a game that wasn’t doomed to be cursed with infamy.

 

This can be hard to believe if you’ve only seen the game’s first half. After all, this is the game where you can steal stuff to trade for bread but bread does nothing so it’s pointless. This is the game where cutscenes sometimes can’t focus on barely moving characters so everyone is a blurry blob.

This is the game where other scenes instead seem to forget where the camera is meant to be pointing so it gives you odd shoulder shots or looks off at the background pointlessly, not to mention a caged witch whose facial expressions shift between overexaggerated almost humorous looks with zero fluidity. At best there’s a part where you use another slave in tedious puzzle solving as you instruct him to move around and flip switches, although that is at least better than most “puzzles” where you often just follow simple instructions after sniffing around or “riddles” where you are only given a few possible replies and rarely would any answer but one make sense. So then, how can this game have a second half that could have potentially redeemed it.

 

Well you see, her name is Mell, and she’s an actual bona fide character in a plot desperately in need of more of them.

Gollum himself is, as mentioned earlier, done superbly both in performance and in how his behavior is written, and were he transplanted into some hypothetical Fantastic, 10/10, Game of the Year video game based on Gollum, I’d have no notes on how to change those elements of his portrayal. He’s given a rubbish world that can’t make its bleakness interesting and mostly has characters like Gandalf relegated to exposition, but the writing on Gollum at least reminds you that a company known for its stories was in charge, altough it takes them a long time to get rolling on putting him in an interesting context. While imprisoned by the elves, mostly they’ll be bemused by your antics and come up with condescending quips, but Mell is something different. Blinded by magic gone wrong, she’s kept in a nearby cell to yours and somehow, being the one blind character means she’s one of the few able to resist the pitiable hunched frogman everyone else seems quick to deem harmless. She wants nothing to do with Gollum, but she holds knowledge of the Haze, a special magical obstruction that means you can’t leave or enter the elf lands without their consent. Hoping to get her to open a way out for him, Gollum lies that he heard the person she values most, the Riddlemaster, still lives.

 

The two plan an escape, together this time unlike with the frail man, and Mell actually shows a bit of personality. She can be a bit playful or sharp with Gollum, but the necessity of their cooperation leads to something akin to a friendship forming, throwing Gollum’s understanding of the world into question. This haggard loathsome creature who gets his name from the unusual way he clears his throat is able to form a relationship not built on pity or suspicion, and this leads to some of the more compelling quarrels between the Gollum and Smeagol halves. It actually causes the first real schism that can’t be rectified so easily between the personalities as their values truly diverge in a large way, and while it’s a small touch, the game’s ninth chapter actually does change a bit based on who ends up asserting themselves more, at least in terms of who is doing the talking.

 

Mell is so very nearly compelling, even if her story starts to thin a bit as you start reaching the game’s final moments, again perhaps in response to the writers not wanting to delve to deep into consequences of earlier interactions. You can still care for her fate, and that is a smart choice for a prequel game where many players have their futures set in stone. Mell’s absence in the future means you can’t be certain she’ll make it out of situations unscathed or even alive, and if this game had just started with the imprisonment by the elves… it would still be awful, way too much climbing still without any meaningful gameplay to balance it out, but it might merely be Terrible because the plot would at least have its moments where it got you invested even if it squandered them as Mell starts lessening her presence in the story as moments where her voice and character come through well become much harder to find.

While we’re here, it should be said other parts of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum wouldn’t need changing in a better version of the game. The elven section of the game again impresses, this time with its visual splendor. The environmental design team really give you a visual feast to counter those early sections where you’ll want to keep your brightness settings high or it will be all a black smudge. At least you can say the slave pits are as ugly as intended, but the greenery and structures of the elven city manage to make some impressive vistas that you can stop and appreciate, even if these vistas primarily exist because Gollum needs something to climb or else what could he possibly be doing?

 

Even wilder though, is The Lord of the Rings: Gollum starts learning lessons in its second half. The slave pits will have you backtrack over familiar ground rather than simply skipping past the return trip after a task is complete, but the second half of the game sometimes will set you where you need to be after the important action is taken, cutting out wasted time that posed no challenge anyway. Padding isn’t completely stripped away but you can at least see in some warped way why the game wants you climb around rather than throwing retreads in your path. Like I said near the start though, a lot of the improvements in this portion come from moving from a mire of absolute failure to a part of the game that actually starts to better resemble what you’d expect out of a video game. That being, a story you could have paid attention to, a place you’d want to visit… and well, the gameplay is still bereft of inspiration most of the time and lacking when it can muster up some new direction thanks to weak puzzle design or stealth that actually seems to get more basic in this portion of the game. Perhaps that’s a greater sin than being atrocious throughout though, as it teases you with this idea it could muster up the energy for something that delivers on its premise, and yet it is all buried beneath persistent problems it can’t outgrow even as it starts to almost become aware of its issues.

 

HERE AT JOURNEY’S END I LIE IN DARKNESS BURIED DEEP

We come to the end of our look at this wasted opportunity, but after the revelations that came with Mell’s addition to the narrative, can we really condemn this game? I suppose there’s only one way we can find out, a final consultation with our squalid pair.

 

Smeagol: The Game Hoard has said before a good story can salvage even a mediocre experience, and when The Lord of the Rings: Gollum finally gets going on crafting one, it’s hard to ignore its upsides. Gollum himself is marvelously realized and Mell is a smart way of drawing out more from the idea of seeing both sides of his mind battling for supremacy. It takes a while to clean itself up, but surely the second half of the game’s contributions can’t be dismissed since they do make up a portion of the experience?

Gollum: Part of the story is the telling, a sentiment J.R.R. Tolkein would no doubt agree with, and The Lord of the Rings: Gollum does not devote its attention properly to those narrative moments that could have formed the heart of a worthwhile gaming experience. Instead its focus is on the preponderance of climbing sections that do not provide most anything of value. Even when it musters up other ways to interact with its world like the stealth they’re often flawed in concept or small diversions that frequently squander their potential by being straightforward. Mell’s late complication to the relationship between Gollum and Smeagol does not nearly justify forgiving a game otherwise defined by tedium and frustration.

While in-game I leaned more towards the sympathetic Smeagol, the truth is The Lord of the Rings: Gollum can’t resist such a harsh evaluation. Even once it got its stability in order after a disastrous launch, you’re really raking through the muck to find a glistening golden bit to try and latch onto, and The Lord of the Rings: Gollum still doesn’t want to see that through since you have oh so much more climbing to do. It can at least briefly quit its addiction to scrambling up cliffsides more in the later parts of the adventure, but the hypothetical Gollum argument here really embodies my final thoughts on this experience as a whole. Tilman Schanen, Damiri Knapheide, and Benjamin Kuhn are listed as the narrative’s writers, Wayne Forester as well as a few other voice actors put in their work, but it feels like most everyone else felt no motivation to realize this strange but fascinating game concept. The interactive side completely undermines any narrative efforts, but even then the writers really should have got a move on with exploring Gollum’s character more rather than wallowing in the aimless suffering of the early adventure.

 

Daedalic Software would close their game development side after the failure of this game, and it would be easy to claim they flew to close to the sun on wax wings of ambition. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum puts so much undue attention into its visuals and then forgets to make traversing its worlds entertaining or really require much thought, hopping around and climbing cliff faces growing stale early on and then the diversions away from it rarely last long enough to leave an impression save for when they are bad as well. The story musters up some late energy thanks to Mell causing an interesting internal conflict for Gollum, but truthfully, it’s too little too late and still surrounded by mindless traversal, unengaging stealth, and puzzles with little substance or solutions that are too easy to surmise.

 

Daedalic Software wasn’t flying towards the sun on its wax wings, because if it was it would have crashed sooner and spared us this game’s release. Instead it tried to shoot for the moon, able to keep on going so it could drag us into the coldness of space with it where we could suffer together, suffocating on a futile voyage where whatever hopes we had were dashed when we realized we had not thought out how the concept we’re dealing with could be anything more than a strange idea.