Reclaiming the Middle-earth from before the movies
You could be forgiven for not caring about Daedalic’s Gollum game. The early development materials I saw during a studio visit in 2019 certainly left me with mixed feelings – fascination and admiration but a degree of unease. To single out one of the more risible elements: a Gollum game in which Gollum can wall-run doesn’t sound very Gollumy. Gollum is known for his agility, of course – picture him in The Two Towers, descending a cliff “like some large prowling thing of insect-kind” – but you can’t just parkour over the line between “creeping menace” and “Prince of Persia”, especially when your title character is the best part of 600 years old.
The Lord of the Rings: GollumPublisher: Nacon/DaedalicDeveloper: DaedalicAvailability: Coming in 2022
Together with certain other boilerplate features, like throwing objects to lure guards out of position, it suggests a studio with little experience of action-adventure clinging zealously to conventions at the expense of its premise. But perhaps the real problem is that nobody really wants to play a Gollumy game. The whole point of Gollum, after all, is that you try not to become him. He’s the cautionary tale Bilbo and Frodo must learn from during their struggle with the Ring – the Hobbit who fell, his mind and body splitting around a terrible obsession.
On a more prosaic level, casting Gollum in a game where you guide the character from behind seems a waste of his defining features. This is how The Hobbit introduced him, way back in 1937: “a small, slimy creature… as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face”. The rest of Gollum’s body is only hinted at, to begin with – most startling of all, if you come to the books from the Jackson films, is the revelation that he has pockets. This ambiguity explains the sheer variety of interpretations of the character by Middle-earth artists over the years: looming Grendel figures, purple lizards and Ferguson Dewar’s affable boatman from 1964, who looks like he’s angling for a New Yorker caption.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum – Sneak Peek Trailer | PS5, PS4 Watch on YouTube
Daedalic’s version closely resembles the Gollum of Andy Serkis, but it’s also an attempt to blend all those different Gollums into something younger and older Tolkienistas might recognise – and in that engagement with the history of Middle-earth in art lies the spark of something wonderful. Gollum is a throwback game in a couple of senses. Firstly, it unfolds before the events of the Fellowship of the Ring, with Gollum separated from his Precious and a prisoner of Sauron’s army in the fortress of Barad-dûr. I haven’t seen this location portrayed so comprehensively in a videogame – indeed, you never really set foot within it in the books – and for those who take issue with the Unreal glower and dinginess of it all, there’s the prospect of lush Elven woodlands down the road. But more important than where it sits in the chronology is Daedalic’s aim to rediscover Middle-earth aesthetics from before the movies – egged on by the license holders at Middle-earth Enterprises, who were impressed by Daedalic’s previous adaptation of Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth. Though shaped by the Jackson sextet, its art direction looks back to Tolkien’s original descriptions and moreover, his sketches and paintings – some printed in the books, others drawn as imaginative aids during writing.
