Any scraps of personality I found in the first few hours of Gollum were largely the ones I provided myself. He would just emit another NPC bark - like “Get moving, slave!” - and harmlessly whip his arm through his single animation again. He was a hulking, dimwitted goon, in a big stone-and-jagged-metal room, with a spooky lady in the center chanting, “The Eye sees all! The Eye knows all!”īut I could press the control stick forward and walk into his legs for as long as it amused me. A hunched and armored orc was yelling at me - Gollum - to get out of my cell and follow a line of slaves to a black iron elevator. Shortly after completing the tutorial of Gollum, I had been captured by Sauron’s ringwraiths (canon), tortured (canon), and thrown in the slave pit of Mordor (canon, not a spoiler!).

This was on my mind as I played The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Daedalic Entertainment’s new Lord of the Rings-inspired action-adventure game.

No orc shouted “ Meat’s on the menu, boys!” in the books, but Peter Jackson’s film trilogy was right on the mark. The generic orc of generic fantasy may be a hulking, dimwitted goon, but they were Tolkien’s chief way of injecting humor into the darkest moments of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s orcs is that they lacked personality.

Lord of the rings: gollum video game