Gollum...

 Sneaky little Daedelic, wicked, tricksy, false!

Now, we live in a very peculiar era of the evolution of the game's industry right now. Games are far beyond that experimental stage of 'throw everything at a wall and see what sticks', which itself saw the birth of many great franchises that stuck around to this day as well as many utter duds that seemed to die in the conceptualisation stage but still, somehow, made it to print. I mean that's just how production worked back in the day- you can up with a stupid idea that you didn't really believe in and never really came together in development but you might as well stick with it- the consumer base didn't really know what good games were back then so they'd probably still eat it up! Developers got a little wacky, games got a little wacky, and it was a more free time of publishing and development where any old game could slip out of the woodworks to blow us all away. (Or disappoint the world spectacularly.)

You just need to take a glance at the line-up of the recent Playstation 'State of Play' to see how that is no longer really the case anymore. Insomniac's Spider Man 2, Metal Gear Solid 3 (remake), Marathon (Reboot), Alan Wake 2, Final Fantasy XVI, Ghost Runner 2, The Talos Principle 2, Assassin's Creed Mirage, Street Fighter 6, Dragon's Dogma 2; they're all continuations to proven properties because that's all the modern world cares about anymore. Sure there were a few new games and franchises revealed during the event, but they were more the substanceless filler propping up the empty space between actual announcements. How many of those non-sequels did people actually end up talking about? Only Phantom Blade Zero because that game looked sick- another one from that spate of promising-looking eastern martial arts games that has come out of nowhere to impress with a trailer and no tangible release date. (Black Myth is 2024, huh? I'll believe it when I see it...)

Experimentation is something of a dead art, underlined by the domination of companies like Ubisoft who currently exist less as a 'development studio' and more like a Frankenstien's lab of conceptual thieves who hop around the industry taking the most 'successful' features of other games and trying to stitch it onto their repeated stale franchises. (I've just gotten around to playing 'Assassin's Creed: Odyssey'; it feels like they're trying to make 5 games at the same time and all of them are only half done.) It makes sense honestly, there's just too much money currently going into the industry to be creative and take risks, too much spent and too much potential to earn. Even indie games tend to trend in similar directions, going through waves of mimicking the same low-budget art styles or the same general genre trends. As such it has become increasingly rare we come across a game like 'Gollum'. Because let's be honest, who in their right mind thought there could be a good game based on 'Gollum'?

In the most vapid and intangible manner possible, I did honestly consider it for a time. I mean the idea seemed inherently repulsive, playing as the loathsome twisted wreck of innocence that Gollum represents, torn by animalistic desire and base instinct- but I guess some dumb part of my brain filled a game like this away with the other 'art piece' style games. Like 'Shadow of the Colossus' or 'The Last Guardian', quiet games that span across grand yet personal adventures which reverberate around the heart and mind of the player in that manner which slips under their membrane and settles in the soul. Moving, powerful experiences that come around once a generation- unless you work for 'Thatgamecompany' or 'Giant Squid', in which case you scramble to try and capture that sensation every game release. (To, in my case, severely diminishing returns.) Um... yeah, so it turns out Gollum is not an understated, subversive masterpiece... actually, it is a little subversive, but certainly no masterpiece.

Gollum is special. A return to that once dead era of rampant, unchecked, experimentation that tainted and twisted all the gaming world back in those halcyon days of creativity. A game formed from a half-baked idea likely shouted out in the middle of a team brainstorming session that no one really liked the sound of but everyone struggled to think up any sound alternatives. Gollum takes the question everyone was asking, how on earth do you make a game about the weakest and lowliest creature in all of 'The Lord of the Rings' and tell a game about him- and answers quite honestly: "We have no idea." It doesn't know if it wants to be a stealth game, an adventure platformer, a puzzle game or even a slice of life chore simulator- and it spectacularly fails at every single one of those things. Oh, and that's on top of being one of the most poorly optimised titles of the past 5 years, in a an era of gaming defined by poor optimisation. Ain't that just a kick in the head? 

Daedalic Entertainment have succeeded in dropping the ball in a way that many didn't think was even possible in the modern age of game design, with checks and balances and overbearing publishers watching your every move. Taking the name of a multi-billion dollar franchise and fumbling it like first time developers might, which Daedalic absolutely aren't, I must add! They've made plenty of games before, enough to know the basics of design principles, but after this release one might wonder if the entire team didn't get replaced by lobotomites overnight, because this product would be an embarrassment for any studio to drop. Joining the ranks of 'Redfall' and 'Forspoken', it really does feel like certain teams out there are in a race to get to the absolute bottom of the dregs of the industry, scouring the depths of just how bad multimillion dollar games become. And today it seems Daedalic may be winning that race... (for now.)

And if you can't tell, the whole thing just flabbergasts me. I mean we can all go back to the 'increadibly spicy' take that it was the mean old executives forcing this game out the door too early which led to it's downfall and... well, yes the game was so pitifully optimised that was absolutely the case as well- but let's not pretend this game has some latent wisp of genuine potential deep in it's heart. It's vapid, it's ridiculously boring, it's eye-wateringly unambitious and it seems to utterly misunderstand it's source material. (Why would Gollum foster a pet bird? Gollum eats birds!) The only way the 'Executives bad' excuse works here is if the executives literally forced the studio to make this game against their wishes (Which is a possibility given the property) and bumrushed the studio in order to lead the development themselves, with absolutely no idea what they're doing, what the modern standards of gaming are or even what fun is. Honestly, I know the whole "nobody wants to make a bad game" line which this team has employed in their apology tour, but sometimes products like this honestly make me wonder.

So Lord of the Rings under the Amazon banner has now issued out another grim offering which makes fans of the timeless fantasy blueprint-story queasy. We've seen that modern Lord of the Rings can't handle brand new stories told within it's world, can't handle TV shows, and can't handle games. And yet we're supposed to hold on and get all excited for 'Lord of the Rings: Online' reboot which is headed our way? What about the next LoTR game that Daedalic is allegedly also scheduled to make? If there's any billionaire angel investor that has a heart for this franchise, I'm sure the entire fantasy loving world would appreciate if they could swoop in and save this beloved piece of yore from Amazon's clearly incompetent paws... wait, unless your name happens to be Elon Musk- dear god, don't let him be the next to disgrace Middle Earth...