Lord of the Rings: Gollum Review: Misery Misery!

There’s a recent meme, created in the wake of so many AAA developers releasing mediocre games under crunch conditions, expressing the need for shorter games with worse graphics made by people paid more to work less. That’s a sentiment worth rooting for, but Lord of the Rings: Gollum really presses up against the limits of the goodwill behind it.

Indeed, this is a game that looks like a remastered PS3 title, only one that plays like a PC game from the early 2000s. That’s not a problem in and of itself—the same mentality that’s made boomer shooters a flourishing genre can be applied successfully to the puzzle-platformer—but just like the character at its center, Gollum is in sad, broken shambles, held together only by the faint belief that the good things about it are enough to make its existence worthwhile.

And those good things are mostly narrative ones, and just on paper. The game explores an untapped angle of Tolkien lore, chronicling the period between Bilbo Baggins stealing the One Ring from Gollum’s cave in The Hobbit and Gollum catching up with Frodo 50 years later during the events of Lord of the Rings. But, the license being what it is, Gollum can’t actually touch on either of those events directly, and instead ends up needing to forge its own tale.

What the developers at Daedalic Entertainment have come up with is, by and large, a Tolkien-based prison story. Gollum is taken prisoner by Sauron’s minions, tortured for information about the whereabouts of the One Ring, and then consigned into slavery in the dark pits of Mount Doom. Much of the game is about Gollum’s years-long toil to survive under the cruel watch of the orcs, while also bearing witness to the political machinations of Sauron’s underlings as they prepare for the coming war. Gollum is forced to tidy up after the corpses that fall in the mines and breed the crebain that Saruman would eventually use to spy on Middle-Earth—all while getting kicked around by his fellow slaves and forced to starve days at a time.

As difficult as all of that is to watch, it’s what finds the game at its strongest. Gollum himself is a striking creation, largely taking visual and vocal inspiration from Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis’s emaciated, ghoulish take on the character, but there’s an added element of innocence here that was muted in the live-action film. Gollum, the shrieking gremlin, being stuck in a dank prison is one thing, but seeing the gentler Smeagol navigate this hellscape is another entirely.

The game handles the conceit of Gollum and Smeagol as dissociative identities rather well. Each side of his personality has its own ideas about how to approach every situation, and to the point where the more crucial dialogue trees come with their own mini-game, where you must get Gollum and Smeagol to agree on how to respond. The character work involved in making Gollum’s plight feel like watching a mentally ill child survive in the worst place imaginable is fascinating, sad, and for much of the game, intriguing enough to beckon the player on. It’s also a plot made all the more complex by its framework: a wraparound story of Gollum, held captive with the elves after his harrowing escape from Mount Doom, being questioned by a version of Gandalf who acknowledges his plight, but isn’t exactly sympathetic to it.

But, then, the game has to actually make players get from point A to B in that story, and that’s when the problems arise. Gollum’s work in between the unfolding of that story mostly boils down to some loose but functional platforming and half-baked stealth, with some basic item collection, all while being shuffled between cutscenes that time-jump with such frequency that it’s often hard to get a foothold on which elements are worth paying attention to.

If a more detailed view of the story’s sprawl had ever come into view, the struggle might have been worth it as a curiosity, but the nail in the coffin is how that story runs out of steam by the time Gollum has made it out of Mount Doom. Very little of what comes after is worth the effort, even for the devout Tolkien nerd who binged Rings of Power and understood it without a Wiki.

Gollum just feels so shockingly old hat—a disheartening collection of mechanics that, at best, bring to mind one of the lesser pre-2013 Tomb Raider games and, at worst, suggest leftovers from the N64 bargain bin. Every success involves wrestling the loose controls, unhelpful camera, and iffy collision detection into submission against an ever-increasing wave of bugs and glitches, only some of which have been fixed by the game’s Day One patch.

This game was reviewed with code provided by Evolve PR.