The biggest achievement in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is Gollum himself. He is a beautifully realized thing. His posture is a tense, shifting crouch. His run is a dizzying run. His movements seem to be shaped by his own bad experiences with the world, never flinching from expected blows. And that head, on top of that small, strong body, was gigantic, full of cunning and cunning wit. The big wet eyes kept turning, looking for an opportunity, any opportunity. The mouth is a tight growl. Gollum, hiding in the dark, swimming in sewage, rattling in the fiery blood mines, looks like Linus van Pelt on the worst day of his life. This isn’t sarcasm – this is exactly what Gollum should look like.
Gollum has always been a fascinatingly chaotic fragment of Tolkien’s books. The other characters aren’t like that at all, crudely sketched on the surface, overtly cartoonish, but with such haunted depth. Other characters don’t argue violently with themselves about what to do. Other characters don’t kill people on their birthdays. The other characters also don’t look as modern as Gollum. He has a pathetic star power that I think – don’t hate me – is missing from the other hobbits and what you have. Gollum is unforgettable.
Now he has his own game, a stealth and action-adventure game with lots of platforming. It’s set — and I’m being loose here — in the gap between The Hobbit and Gollum’s reappearance in Lord of the Rings. Gollum lost his treasure, but he really wanted it back. Ever wondered what he was doing during this time? Now you can find out.
Honestly, I think this is a problem. Gollum is a great character in the story, but I’m not sure if that means he’s a great engine for the story in general. As one can imagine, Gollum’s roams between the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings were covered up by Tolkien because they weren’t very interesting. Gollum was funny when he met Bilbo, and funny when he started following Frodo. What happened in between? Do we need to know?
Sadly, the Gollum game doesn’t have any particularly good answers. Gollum begins in Mordor’s prison and spends a long time trying to escape. After that, I really shouldn’t break anything. But I should also tell you that there’s nothing spoiler-worthy about it. How could there be? We know how Gollum ends up because it’s all in Lord of the Rings. His interesting adventures have been documented many years ago and have been made into a movie.
Finding this window of Gollum Time to effectively expand means that, despite best efforts, the story isn’t really going to be interesting. It felt doomed from the start. In film school parlance, Gollum can’t make much progress here, because once he’s done with this adventure, he has to succeed in Tolkien’s books, and he needs to be a specific character in those books—a Being able hasn’t evolved much since The Hobbit.
I should add: I don’t blame the developers for this. You buy the license you can afford, folks, if that’s Gollum, you go for it. But I think there’s a lesson here for those who control intellectual property: Fundamentally, just selling that crap is not the same as protecting a brand. Good storytelling is about knowing what you can skip. Or, to put it another way, good stories often contain neither content nor content. As such, the games that emerge from these deals largely break the late come early leave early rule that defines so much exciting content in the narrative. Gollum sticks to what other writers have cut out. With the best intentions in the world, if you’re here for the story, you’ll settle in the jagged, abstract landscape of Tolkien’s wastebasket and spend 15 hours manipulating Gollum.
I’ve said all this, but I also think that none of that will matter if Gollum’s game transcends its slightly lackluster story territory. Sadly, it’s a well-intentioned botch, marred by technology and – worse – its control.
Let’s turn the points upside down. Gollum is a game that mixes platforming and stealth. The platforming at least benefits from some really cute level design. From the mines and prison camps of Mordor to the more delightful places, every level has a moment where the camera pulls back and you have some truly tantalizing climbs in front of you, happy ten minutes from the ledge to the top of the ledge, Run walls, swing from railings, and climb forever higher.
I like these things in principle, but sadly Gollum isn’t for it. The controls are sleepy but also wayward. You’ll press a button, but not be sure that the input will be registered. Or it might register and do something you hadn’t thought of at all. At times like this, I’m reminded of the early Tomb Raider, which Gollum’s design sometimes invokes. By building games around a grid system and rarely making special cases, these games have controls that are difficult to master but can be completely relied upon. Because of that grid, at any given time you know how far Lara can jump and which ledges she can reach.
Gollum, however, belongs to the Uncharted school of platforming, where everything has been tweaked to allow for grander environments and more cinematic traversal. these games? It often feels like they’re cooking things up all the time, making you do impossible jumps and wall runs, and generally feel cool in set pieces. Gollum, however, made a mess of it. It often fudges things up, and sometimes it feels like it’s in control when it shouldn’t be. At best, this means you can never be entirely sure if Gollum will perform a jump that feels impossible, because you don’t know if the game will step in to help you. At its worst, the game jumps in to help you when you don’t really need it, and Gollum thumps in directions you didn’t expect. Cue Nigel Pargetter’s Death Cry.
Special moves — wall runs and those swing bars — are especially bad for these things. I love the passion and craftsmanship with which this design mixes different types of traversals, but early on, whenever I saw some running wall or the markings of one of the bars, I started to sigh. I don’t know if this game will handle me. Will it log my typing or stop everything. Will it understand that I want to stop swinging on the bar so I can maneuver a bit, or will it leave me dangling when my stamina bar dwindles to zero?
To be sure, there are moments when the game really flows – especially when you’re in the middle of escaping Mordor. The gauntlets here are very artful in their complexity and the elegance of their layout. But the game’s controls often can’t match the intelligence of the level design. It is painful to see such good intentions so often betrayed.
Stealth was a bit of a mess from the get-go, if platforming at least made me happy with the overall intent. Enemies are dumb, sneaking around is no fun, the throw controls for distraction are definitely weird, and those parts always go on too long. Gollum is a game packed with content – jagged chapters will be crammed with objectives you need to complete, but it doesn’t really move the plot forward. Part of so many tasks could be an email. But stealth is always where things break down most often. It’s hard to figure out what you’re going to do, or how far a particular enemy can see. Thankfully, with nice autosave points, what you get is that stopping the startup process just got a lot more palatable.
Stealth missions also feel like the game’s most buggy. Warning here: I played on PC and the game is shaky but playable. I’ve heard the console version is more confusing. Even so, at least on one stealth mission I found from Death Reloaded that the clockwork movie world around me had stopped and I couldn’t trigger any new progression. Or I reload and find I can’t move, but everything else works. Or I reload to see the “game over” screen and reloading – thank goodness – puts me back in action. At the worst possible moment, I had to go backwards – slipped from “reload last checkpoint” to “restart chapter”. not ideal.
It feels mean to go on, really, especially when Gollum has such obvious kindness everywhere. But it’s just a little too often. Clever ideas persist for too long, or conflict with control issues, requiring constant reboots. (One section builds on the classic Dale Winton game show “The Hole in the Wall”—a Tolkien favorite I’ve collected—that was hilarious and clever until the fifteenth attempt.) Also, I The more I play, the more I admire the developer’s commitment to building a game that’s the opposite of a Thrones fantasy – Gollum eats bugs to restore health, everyone he meets yells at him, and it seems only when he It really picks up when you kill someone – but the more I wish there was more emotional texture to keep me going. Early quest types: Go down the mine, collect tags from corpses, go to the sewers. Now is a good time to take a break from eating bugs. It’s Gollum Stuff for sure, but it can affect you.
Eventually it found me. Last night, at some point in the final chapter, I’m assuming I’m at most a few sequences past the end of the entire game, I found myself standing in front of a puzzle door, I poked at it, but throughout most of the game Hours are not progressing. I can no longer tell if I’m missing something because I’m too fat (which must always be the case), if I’m missing something because the puzzle is poorly oriented, or if I’m missing something because the game is failing. I tried everything, and then eventually I restarted the chapter and lost an hour of progress, most of which involved a maze with a stealth section. I left it there and I still can’t muster the courage to go back.
It’s heartbreaking. Gollum has lovely design moments and genuine grit – a team working to do justice for something they love. But it has so many problems that only patches can fix some of them. It’s often a well-intentioned mess, and I can see talented people pouring their lives into it. So I guess in a perverse way, it does have that air of melancholy that so often hangs over Tolkien.
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