Gollum has two personalities — I wish the Gollum game had any

One thing you can’t say about JRR Tolkien’s orcs is that they had no personality. The generic orc of the generic fantasy may be a hulking, dumb bastard, but to Tolkien, they were his main way of injecting humor into the darkest moments of his life. Under the spell of the Ring. Not a single orc yelled, “Meat’s on the menu, boys!” in the books, but Peter Jackson’s trilogy was spot on.

This was on my mind as I played Lord of the Rings: Gollum, the new LotR-inspired action-adventure from Daedalic Entertainment. Shortly after completing the tutorial from Gollum, I had been captured by Sauron’s ring wraiths (cannon), tortured (cannon), and thrown into the slave pit of Mordor (cannon, no spoiler!). A hunched and armored orc yelled at me—Gollum—to get out of my cell and follow a line of slaves to a black iron elevator. He was a hulking stupid bastard, in a great room of stone and jagged metal, with a ghostly lady in the middle singing, ‘The eye sees all! The eye knows everything!”

But I could push the tiller forward and walk into his legs as long as it amused me. He would just emit another NPC bark – like “Get started, slave!” — and whips his arm harmlessly through his single animation again. All the bits of personality I found in the first few hours of Gollum were largely those I provided myself.

In fact, I could walk endlessly in the legs of each NPC in the room, including the ghostly lady. The orcs had some extra barking about me not being allowed near her, but there was absolutely nothing stopping me from wandering. I could walk into 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, because he called me a worthless digger.

I did it often, walking with Gollum from one orc-filled room to the next, wondering if anyone would react to my antics. Nobody did. Instead, I had to cling on and do whatever the NPC bark told me to do, a series of what I’m going to call “slave tasks.”

On the surface these were all different, but mechanically they all called for me to navigate an area that looked nice but really only had one intended path. Sometimes I sneak around the area. Sometimes I climbed. Sometimes I raced against a timer. If I ever lost track of the trail, I could hit a trigger button to activate “the Gollum Sense,” which turned the world to shades of gray and showed some bright orange wisps moving in the direction I should have chosen, as if Daedalic lacks confidence in the game’s signage.

Finally, I dutifully walked into his cell with Gollum and dutifully pressed X to go to sleep, figuring that after a day of slave duties there would surely be a cutscene that sped up the game. Unfortunately, I woke up the next day and repeated my walk to the same elevator (no creepy lady this time) and down the same hallway where other slaves spat on me through a grate, to do more slave tasks.

My time with Gollum was neatly divided into traversal challenges, walking (crawling, actually) simulation, and a soup of dialogue choices. Daedalic has promoted the game as a chance to really get into the broken mind of the lowest victim of Sauron’s brutality. In my roughly two-hour experience, I suspect Daedalic later applies the Smeagol/Gollum dynamic to more nuanced choices than the only ones I encountered.

Image: Daedalic Entertainment/Nacon

But even in the more casual, less consistent dialogue options I saw, Gollum seems to rest on an interpretation of Gollum’s “personalities” that is inconsistent with Tolkien’s writing. In Under the spell of the Ring, it’s not that Gollum is evil and Smeagol is a sweet little baby who never did anything wrong. Smeagol is just a passive and cowardly voice, next to Gollum’s violent and manic one. After all, Sam called him ‘Slinky and Stinker’, not ‘the Nice and Stinker’.

The easy response to Lord of the Rings: Gollum is to ask contemptuously, “Of all the Lord of the Rings, why make a game about Gollum?” But there are countless ways imaginable to make a great video game about Gollum. At the very least, I’d check out a crazy Gollum fishing game for mobile! I would 100% Untitled goose gamestyle romp through the big beats of Under the spell of the Ring. I’d strategize for a deck-builder “riddle” game where you play against lost orcs who wander into your pool and eventually the final boss, that cheater Bilbo Baggins.

A better question is, “Why did you create this video game about Gollum?” If you’re going to make a simulation game about a miserable creature in a miserable situation, it has to be meaningful and compelling, or it has to have a Heeheehoohoo factor. Based on trailers and certain hints in the opening hours of Gollum, I know there’s gameplay on the other side of Mordor in store. But the lack of personality has already sealed my save file’s demise (demise, drums in the deep). I’ve seen these orcs before; I’ve seen this Mordor before. It’s a version of Middle-earth played perfectly straight, 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 that wanted me to find eight dog tags from eight slave corpses hidden in the mines before I could continue with the non-slave portion of the game. The memory of strawberries may have sent Frodo through Mordor, but I can just turn the game off.

Lord of the Rings: Gollum was released on May 25 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PS5 using a pre-release download code from Daedalic Entertainment. Vox Media has partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find additional information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy here.