![]() I’d at least check out a goofy Gollum fishing game for mobile! I’d 100% an Untitled Goose Game-style romp through the major beats of The Lord of the Rings. The easy response 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. Sam called him “Slinker and Stinker,” after all, not “the Nice One and Stinker.” Smeagol is simply a passive and craven voice, seated in tandem with Gollum’s violent and manic one. In The Lord of the Rings, it’s not that Gollum is bad and Smeagol is a sweet widdle baby what never done did any wrong. In my roughly two hours of experience, I suspect that Daedalic later applies the Smeagol/Gollum dynamic to more nuanced choices than the single one I encountered.īut even in the more casual, less consequential dialogue options I saw, Gollum seems to be resting on an interpretation of Gollum’s “personalities” that rings false to Tolkien’s writing. Daedalic has promoted the game as a chance to really get inside the fractured mind of the lowliest victim of Sauron’s cruelty. My time with Gollum was neatly divided into traversal challenges, walking (crawling, really) simulation, and a soupçon of dialogue choices. Unfortunately, I woke up the next day and repeated my walk down to the same elevator (no spooky lady this time) and through the same hallway where other slaves spat on me through a grate, in order to do more slave tasks. 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.Įventually, 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. Superficially, these were all different, but mechanically, they all called on me to navigate an area that looked fancy but really only had one intended path. ![]() 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.” I did it a lot, as I walked Gollum from one room full of orcs to another, investigating whether anyone would respond to my capering antics. I could do it to the mine master as he called me a worthless digger. I could do it to the beastmaster orc as he threatened to feed me to his monsters. I could walk into any orc in any corner of any room the game took me into. 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 fact, I could walk endlessly into the legs of any NPC in the room, including the spooky lady. Any scraps of personality I found in the first few hours of Gollum were largely the ones I provided myself. He would just emit another NPC bark - like “Get moving, slave!” - and harmlessly whip his arm through his single animation again. 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!”īut I could press the control stick forward and walk into his legs for as long as it amused me. 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. Shortly after completing the tutorial of Gollum, I had been captured by Sauron’s ringwraiths (canon), tortured (canon), and thrown in the slave pit of Mordor (canon, not a spoiler!). This was on my mind as I played The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Daedalic Entertainment’s new Lord of the Rings-inspired action-adventure game. No orc shouted “ Meat’s on the menu, boys!” in the books, but Peter Jackson’s film trilogy was right on the mark. The generic orc of generic fantasy may be a hulking, dimwitted goon, but they were Tolkien’s chief way of injecting humor into the darkest moments of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s orcs is that they lacked personality.
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