I’ve waxed poetic about my love for The Lord of the Rings b🎐efore, so I’ll spare you the mandatory opening paragraph on childhooﷺd, tattoos, and first editions of Tolkien that burned a meteoric hole in my pocket. Instead, let me just say this: Gollum is more than a worthy protagonist, and Daedalic’s simultaneous separation and integration of his shared psyche with Smeagol looks like a stroke of utter genius.
Last week, I saw about 20 minutes of Gollum gameplay at Daedalic Digital 2021. I’ve already written about 1🥃68澳洲幸运5开奖网:how excellent its depiction🀅 of Mordor is - Barad-dur reminds me of early Assassi🧸n’s Creed, except, you know, filled with fire and death - and explained that it appears to make use of Gollum’s uniquely strange mastery of movement, but there’s much more to it than that. While I only saw a tailored-to-press chunk of the overall🐷 experience, the way in which The Lord of the Rings: Gollum grapples with the infamous hobbit’s dual identities is fascinating, functional, and best of all, fitting.
For those unfamiliar with how Gollum became a centuries-old malnourished demon with four teeth and Tobias Funke’s hair transplant, he was originally a hobbit named Smeagol. While out on a boat with his best bud - Deagol, how spectacularly creative - the pair discover the One Ring and fight to the death over it. Smeagol is eventually ostracized for his justifiably perceived hand in Deagol’s death, and so he retreats to the mountains and survives on a diet of orc remains an💜d raw, head-on fish. While he’s still technically Smeagol, his adaptation to this alien environment - both in personality and physicality - takes on a personification of its own: Gollum.
There are plenty of games that offer you multiple ways of defining your character’s morality. Mass Effect’s Paragon/Renegade dichotomy is probably one of the most famous and beloved examples of this, while Telltale games opt for the more overtly expositionaꦑl “Clementine will remember that'' messages. But precious (eh? eh?) few games are as jam-packed with thousands upon thousands of pages’ worth of subtext as Gollum.
From what I saw during last week’s demo, you’ll regularly be hit with situations in which you need to choose between siding with Gollum or Smeagol. Say there’s an orc below you - Smeagol will want to hide, shivering and skimpering between rocks while keeping his hand over his mouth so as not to alert the brutish oaf three times your size. Gollum, however, will be quick to perceive that the orc is alone. See that rock? Makes for a decent bludgeon, don’t you think? Pick it up, tail the orc all sneaksy-like, and cave its head in - there’s dinner for two sorte൲d.
The thing about Gollum and Smeagol is that they’re completely interdependent. Despite Gollum’s agility and adaptability, Smeagol is the necessary sycophant that gets him out of tricksy situations. Sam would have knocked Gollum’s teeth in long before reaching Minas Morgul had Smeagol not won Frodo over, which proves that even Smeagol is corrupted to the extent of 💙only being agreeable when he has ulterior motives. They’re lite💫rally two sides of the same precious (and another one!) coin.
Decision-making in Gollum appears to reflect this perfectly. While we were watching the demo, Daedalic explained that you can’t just Smeagol your way through a benevolent playthrough like a Paragon Commander Shepard. People will die - yes, there are friendly NPCs - and the game will become significantly more difficult if you don’t learn that certain situations call for Gollum, while others are much better suited to Smeagol. I imagine the optimal playthrough of the game is about 60/40 Gollum-to-Smeagol, in that both characters are necessary for saving each other, but Gollum is the true master of self-serving subterfuge. By the end of the game, you’ll probably realize that the choice between Gollum and Smeagol is mostly an illusory one - sure, you can technically choose not to kill the orc, but what happens if it turns around? The reason Gollum is imbued with such pathos despite being so utterly reprehensible is because of how tragic his condition is, burdened with constantly second-guessing his instinct for survival out of an ever-growing residual hatred towards the abhorrent measures necessary for maintaining it. You can’t have a faithful iteration of this character without assigning both o🙈f his identities near-equal narrative weight.
I was always curious about how this game was going to tackle Gollum’s notorious dichotomy of character, and I can confidently say that this seems like the best possible way of doing so. It’s not like a game that nudges you to be good or bad in terms of the overarching narrative. It’s an experience designed to showcase how Gollum flits between the two not necessarily by choice, but out of necessity. There are scenes in The Lord of the Rings where Gollum truly does seem as if he’s being genuine in his decision to assist Frodo out of benevolence, with proximity to the Ring being enough to whet his insatiable appetite for it. Ultimately, though, the Ring is why both Gollum and Smeagol are still alive, and the two of them are inextricably linked because of their mutually conscious recognition of that fact. I’m not necessarily excited to make less, er… friendly decisions as Gollum, although I’m absolutely impressed by the fact I’m going to h🦩ave to. The dynamic is nuanced, significant, and dare I say it: precious.