The Lord of the Rings: Gollum Review

The premise is why this one stings. Gollum is the character in Tolkien with a working internal argument, and a game that stops, lets both voices make a case and asks you to pick a winner is an idea nobody had built. Daedalic lands a few of those moments, and the Mirkwood material has a genuine shape to it. Everything around them fails. Climbing is the main verb and it functions only on the ledges the artists marked, so walls read as puzzles and play as guesswork, with a jump that snaps toward nothing and drops you.

Stealth is fixed patrols down corridors with one route through, and detection is instant and total. The look ended the conversation before the design could be argued at all: muddy textures, stiff faces, animation that pauses between poses, shipped in 2023 alongside games several generations ahead. Performance was poor everywhere at launch and worse on the older consoles.

Later reporting filled in the cause, a team asked for a prestige adaptation on a budget that could never fund one, across years of restarts. Daedalic apologized within days, closed its development arm the following month, and a good pitch went down with a product that could not carry any of it.