Superficially, these were all different, but mechanically, they all called on me to navigate an area that looked fancy but really only had one intended path.
Instead, I had to buckle down and do what the NPC barks told me to do, a set of what I’m gonna call “slave tasks.” I did it a lot, as I walked Gollum from one room full of orcs to another, investigating whether anyone would respond to my capering antics.
I could do it to the mine master as he called me a worthless digger. I could do it to the beastmaster orc as he threatened to feed me to his monsters. I could walk into any orc in any corner of any room the game took me into. The orcs had some extra barks about how I wasn’t allowed near her, but there was absolutely nothing to actually stop me from wandering. In fact, I could walk endlessly into the legs of any NPC in the room, including the spooky lady. 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 LotR-inspired action-adventure. No orc shouted “ Meat’s on the menu, boys!” in the books, but Peter Jackson’s trilogy was right on the mark. The generic orc of generic fantasy may be a hulking, dimwitted goon, but to Tolkien they were his chief way of injecting humor into the darkest moments of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s orcs is that they lacked personality.
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