A few months before its release, the Gollum video game is in a worrying state

Daedalic Days is a bit like the annual festival of the German studio Daedalic. For a few days, it invites the press and influencers to come and discover their next titles directly on their premises, where you can try the games directly and chat with the creators. This year, we were able to discover the game of making potions Potion Tycoona cooperative roguelike named Wild Woodsor the very soothing Wanderful — where cards are placed to build a small village. But the biggest attraction, the one that had its own room in which a large plastic statue was enthroned, was obviously The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. This title, announced in March 2019, was playable for one hour.

Gollum is Ring Maman Bobo

The project Gollum already didn’t smell very good in recent months, when the first gameplay trailers were getting turned on in the YouTube comments. Accusing a serious technical delay, the game has been postponed three times, but this time, it is apparently the good one: it must be released this year. On our side, we were able to try two of its levels for an hour, before coming to the conclusion that the videos did not lie about the direction of the project. We have indeed played a deeply broken game.

In what he wants to offer, we can already say that we are navigating on familiar ground. It’s a third-person action/adventure game like it rained hundreds a decade ago. It is punctuated with platforming, infiltration and puzzle sequences that will take us on a tour of Middle-earth and chat with its funny inhabitants – some known to the public and others created especially for this new project. Gollum is in good physical shape despite his somewhat questionable lifestyle, and it is precisely by crawling, climbing and jumping that he will make his way through the various semi-open levels of the game. Daedalic seems to want to do many things at once. And that’s unfortunately where it starts to get stuck: when we try to do too much, we sometimes forget to do even one thing correctly.

There are in the sequences that we have been able to discover a battery of systemic problems that affect all aspects of the game, whether we are walking around with Gollum or watching a cinematic sequence. The phases on foot, for example, are based on two pillars: the platform and the infiltration. When you’re not jumping from one ledge to another to get to the end of the level, you have to avoid elves and other creatures that patrol so as not to end up in the dungeon. Nothing could be simpler: we just have to cross our fingers so that the very approximate detection cone of the guards does not detect us, then to hope that the stones we use to distract them do not get lost because of a random technical issue. Obviously, when it doesn’t work, we repeat the same thing over and over again until we reach the next checkpoint.

After such an observation, we therefore understand that infiltration does not really work and we will prefer the joys of running, more practical to escape far from the elves likely to chase us. No luck there again: the control scheme, apparently designed for people with thirteen fingers per hand, forces you to press three or four different buttons for the most advanced climbing sequences, and the slightest oversight in the sequence of keys returns us a few meters lower. Now imagine all that and you can imagine the exhaustion you felt after stomping on the same jump just minutes after the tutorial was over.

Don’t count too much on it

These mechanical problems are to be decorrelated from the technical problems, which are also present from the beginning to the end of our game session. It can range from the level to be restarted because Gollum got stuck in a stone, to a character who teleports out of a cutscene or 3D model charging a few feet away from where it’s supposed to be. Joystick in hand, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum looks like it’s resting entirely on two toothpicks and a piece of tape, ready to break at any moment. During the first level, one of the developers even thanked us for having found a new bug, after having smiled when seeing our dear Sméagol walking on the ceiling because of a crap jump.

Fortunately, the studio had the good idea to make Gollum blow during a few puzzles, whose cryptic solutions are to be found in the decor to interact with certain elements. These sequences are also an opportunity to advance the narrative, thanks to cutscenes giving rise to branches in the dialogues. We probably don’t tell you anything: our frail and hunchbacked hero is not alone in his head, and his two personalities (Gollum and Sméagol) can burst into a discussion to push the player to make a choice likely to alter the continuation of the story. Well, we couldn’t see the effects directly, already because we only had an hour to try the game, but above all because the button to select Sméagol in the dialogues didn’t work.

Nothing helps, the state of the game is indeed alarming, but you still have to wonder if, for a person passionate about Tolkien’s universe, it can be worth it. If only to follow the story, perhaps? After all, it’s true, it explores a piece of The Lord of the Rings that has yet to be told and for the game’s creators, it’s an opportunity to explore new things in Middle-earth. There are just a few interesting characters introduced to us, and some cool lines of dialogue to read in these shot-reverse cutscenes that are two generations behind.

Even if it was, even if this video game The Lord of the Rings: Gollum comes out with an extraordinary story, we don’t know if that would be enough to make us forget the treatment reserved for this poor Sméagol in the rest of the adventure. It would not be surprising to learn that the game is once again postponed, or to see that it is waiting for the last months of the year to correct the situation. We also hope that he will. Otherwise, we risk having a big problem when people start playing it.

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