The Lord of the Rings: Gollum – Zero Punctuation

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a game about Gollum from Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings is fast becoming the new Star Wars – they won’t be happy until every side character and murky period on the timeline has been crowbarred out and used to seed a new potential media empire. Still, pivotal though the character is, there’s probably more fruitful places you could’ve gone to before this. Who looked at the ugly weak little monster who spent four hundred years eating raw fish in a cave before causing a whole bunch of problems and dying in a fire and thought “Yeah, this windowlicker’s got a rich backstory worth mining. They’d be a great spokesperson for social distancing in the age of COVID.” The entire plot of Gollum was glossed over in the source material in like two lines – Sauron captured Gollum, tortured him for a bit, then let him piss off. We now learn that Sauron’s preferred torture device during this ordeal was about eight hours of extremely shonky stealth platforming gameplay. Paired with a binary choices matter morality system the way one pairs a plate of mouse turds and dried glue with a tall glass of coffee machine runoff.

To be honest, I’m hard pressed to envision how a game about Gollum could’ve worked. On the narrative level, one can get behind a nasty effective protagonist or a nice ineffectual one, but nasty and ineffectual? That’s just depressing, even before I had to watch the little scrote die an average of fifty times an hour, knowing that his eventual lifelong peak will only come after he bites a finger off of nice pretty Elijah Wood. In the first half of the game Gollum’s psychotic little muttering ass is enslaved in an Orc mine so he and by extension we don’t do much more than what the orcs tell him to do, as they spit on him and remind him that he’s a minute smear of bird plop on the rear bumper of the universe that’s barely worth the effort of cleaning off. In the second half of the game he gets rescued by elves who treat him nicely and give him food and a lovely place to live so obviously he spends the whole time being a horrible bastard to them and trying to escape so he can get back to his busy schedule of sabotaging his own life. So yeah, the prospects of the story are bleak even before we tackle the gameplay, and afterwards are more at the “suicidal” level.

“Suicidal” is certainly the word that leaps to mind during the climbing and platforming which is about the only consistently present gameplay mechanic, after I’ve spent twelve reloads trying to get the little twatbadger to jump the right way. I guess living in a cave is no excuse to skip leg day ‘cos he leaps like a frog mistaking a barbecue pit for a bidet, but most of the standard suite of jumps and contextual grabs are fairly in character for Gollum when he’s scrabbling up walls and along ledges like a spider navigating a bathtub, maybe not so much when he’s doing pole gymnastics. But it’s all tainted by a general ineptitude of design in multiple key areas like making it clear where we’re supposed to go and what is and is not a climbable ledge, I’ve never missed the ministrations of the yellow spray paint brigade more. As I say, the little shitmuncher jumps like an amorous farmhand hearing the henhouse door slam shut so it’s even odds that he’ll actually land on the platform you’re aiming at or if you’ll get to enjoy once again the unique sound of a leather bagful of broken deckchair parts being hurled into a crevasse. The only other candidate for core gameplay mechanic is the stealth, but that never does much beyond “dudes walk back and forth along straight lines and you basically have to reload if you get spotted at all,” which is to the general standards of video game stealth what a five second pull-off behind the bike sheds for half a bag of Chipsticks is to a high class escort service.

I’d go for “stealth platformer” if pressed to summarise the gameplay, but in all honesty it’s mostly a string of inflexible set pieces where the main objective is just “go to where we say to go and do the thing.” Like when we learn how to instruct friendly NPCs which we do maybe twice and never again, or the bit where we learn how to breed a carrier pigeon confused and slightly affronted tone of voice which we do once and never again, and try to imagine all of this infused with the constant presence of janky animation so switching between climbing styles under pressure is like reassembling a jigsaw with clothes pegs on all your fingertips and all the NPC facial animation resembles that of a Chuck E Cheese animatronic being called out for lying on their resume. Then there’s the binary moral choice system, which is again on brand as it’s presented as Gollum and Smeagol arguing amongst themself, but it’s not enough to have us make a decision, we must then go to a little black room and play Dissociative Identity Disorder Debate Club where we must pick the right options to convince the other personality to go with what we asked to do.

Well done, Gollum, you found a way to make binary moral choice slightly more obnoxious, I guess the biscuit can always get soggier. Especially when I thought I’d won the debate but Gollum did the opposite of what I asked anyway, which was either a bug or the game finally fully committing to pissing me about. But I still think the hate this game’s attracted has been a bit over the top. The developers, Daedalic, have all but exclusively made point and click adventures before this, they wanted to move into the bigger leagues and didn’t have the chops. There’s no malice behind that. At least there’s no tacked-on RPG elements or crafting or gear grinding in which we swap out Gollum’s dirty underpants for Level 24 Legendary Fiery Dirty Underpants of the Wombat. There was ambition here to be more than just another cynical timefiller. Bad as it is, it’s not bad in the way that makes it fun to kick around. So don’t hate Daedalic Entertainment, viewers. Pity Daedalic Entertainment. Pity them for being but a simple, innocent creature twisted and malformed by its attempt to cling to a power far beyond its reach. Ooh. I think I feel a games journalism coming on.