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

One thing that cannot be said about JRR Tolkien’s Orcs is that they lacked personality. The generic orc of generic fantasy may be a hulking, dimwitted git, but for Tolkien, they were his primary way of bringing humor to the darkest moments Lord of the Rings. No orcs shouted, “Meat’s on the menu, boys!” in the books, but Peter Jackson’s trilogy hit the spot.

That’s what went through my head while playing The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Daedalic Entertainment’s new LotR-inspired action-adventure. Shortly after completing the tutorial by gollumI was captured by Sauron’s Ringwraiths (cannon), tortured (cannon) and thrown into the slave pit of Mordor (cannon, no spoiler!). A stooped and armored orc yelled at me – Gollum – to leave my cell and follow a line of slaves to an elevator of black iron. He was a hulking, dimwitted git in a great room of stone and jagged metal, with a creepy lady in the center chanting, “The eye sees all! The eye knows all!”

But I could push the stick forward and run into his legs for as long as I liked. He would just let out another NPC bark – like “Move, slave!” – and harmlessly whip his arm through his single animation again. Any scraps of personality I found in the first few hours gollum were mostly the ones I made available to myself.

In fact, I could run into my legs endlessly any NPC in the room including the creepy lady. The orcs barked extra because I wasn’t allowed near them, but there was absolutely nothing that actually stopped me from wandering. I could meet every orc in every corner of every room the game took me to. I could jump up and down. I could do it to the beastmaster orc when he threatened to feed me to his monsters. I could do it to the miner since he called me a worthless excavator.

I’ve done it many times, escorting Gollum from one roomful of orcs to another, inquiring if anyone would react to my capricious antics. Nobody did. Instead, I had to buckle up and do what the NPC barked at me, a series of tasks I’ll call “slave tasks”.

On the surface these were all different, but mechanically they all asked me to navigate an area that looked fancy but actually had only one designated path. Sometimes I sneaked around secretly. Sometimes I climbed. Sometimes I raced against a timer. Should I ever lose track of the path, I could press a trigger button to activate “the Gollum Sense” which would turn the world to shades of gray and display some bright orange streaks moving in whichever direction I would have chosen intended as if Daedalic had a lack of faith in the game’s environmental signage.

Finally, I dutifully escorted Gollum to his cell and obediently pressed X to go to sleep. I figured that after a day of slave quests, there would surely be a cutscene that would speed up the game. Unfortunately, I woke up the next day and repeated my walk down to the same elevator (not a creepy lady this time) and through the same hallway where other slaves spat at me through a grate for more slave tasks.

my time with gollum was neatly divided into traversal challenges, walking simulation (actually crawling), and a range of dialogue options. Daedalic has promoted the game as a chance to truly delve into the broken mind of the lowest victim of Sauron’s cruelty. In my two or so hours of experience, I suspect that Daedalic applies the Smeagol/Gollum dynamic to more nuanced choices later than the only one I’ve encountered.

But even in the looser, less consequential dialogue choices I’ve seen, gollum appears to be based on an interpretation of Gollum’s “personalities” that sounds wrong compared to Tolkien’s writings. In Lord of the RingsIt’s not that Gollum is bad and Smeagol is a cute, funny baby who has never done anything wrong. Smeagol is simply a passive and cowardly voice that harmonizes with Gollum’s violent and manic voice. Sam ended up calling him “slinker and stinker,” not “nice and stinky.”

The simple answer to The Lord of the Rings: Gollum It’s dismissive to ask, “Why would you make a game about Gollum out of the whole Lord of the Rings?” But you can think of any number of ways to make a great video game about Gollum. I’d at least check out some silly gollum fishing game for mobile! I would 100% do it Untitled goose game-Style romp through the big beats of Lord of the Rings. I would look for strategies for a deck building puzzle game where you play against lost orcs wandering to your pool and finally the final boss, the impostor Bilbo Baggins.

A better question is, “Why did you do it? The Video game about Gollum?” If you’re going to make a simulation game about a miserable creature in a miserable situation, it either has to be meaningful and compelling, or it has to have a heeheehoohoo factor. Based on trailers and certain notes in the opening times of gollum, I know there’s gameplay on the other side of Mordor. But the lack of personality has already sealed the doom of my save file (doom, drumming in the deep). I’ve seen these orcs before; I’ve seen this Mordor before. It’s a completely straight-forward played version of Middle-earth, but without the creativity or flexibility to maintain immersion.

I wasn’t just locked in a cell by orcs. I was also trapped by a game where I was supposed to find eight dog tags from eight slave corpses hidden in the mines before I could continue with the non-slave part of the game. The memory of strawberries might have made Frodo go through Mordor, but I can just turn the game off.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was released on May 25th on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X. The game has been tested on PS5 with a pre-download code provided by Daedalic Entertainment. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, however Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. You can find For more information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy, click here.