The Lord of the Rings: Gollum - Precious Edition

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a third-person stealth platformer that fills in a gap of Tolkien lore most fans probably didn't know they wanted filled. You play as the wretched, ring-obsessed Smeagol-turned-Gollum across ten chapters, moving through iconic locations like the dark slave pits of Barad-dur and the elven forests of Mirkwood, before the events of The Fellowship of the Ring. The framing device is clever enough: Gandalf interrogates Gollum in a Mirkwood cell, and the story unfolds in flashback. You even meet characters like Thranduil and Mell, a blind elf who serves as an unlikely ally. The concept on paper is genuinely interesting. In practice, almost everything breaks down at the execution level. The core loop is shadow-hopping stealth and climbing traversal. Gollum can jump, wall-run, swing on bars, shimmy ledges, and throw rocks to distract guards. There are no weapons, no combat system to speak of beyond the occasional unarmored-orc choke-out, and no skill tree or ability unlocks across the entire runtime. What you see in the opening hour is all there is. The stealth itself is inconsistently implemented: guards sometimes ignore you when they shouldn't, and detect you through solid cover when logic says they can't. A "Gollum Vision" detective mode highlights enemies and paths but was reported by multiple reviewers to be unreliable. The platforming suffers from an uncooperative camera that swings into Gollum's back during climbs, and a jump system where the distance Gollum actually travels feels disconnected from player input. There is one mechanic worth calling out as a spark of something better: the Gollum-versus-Smeagol choice system. At dialogue decision points, you pick a course of action and then have to convince the other personality to go along. It reflects the character's fractured psychology in a way that feels true to the source material. But reviewers broadly found that these choices carry little narrative consequence, which undercuts the tension they could have created. The story itself leans heavily on assumed Tolkien knowledge, and even fans found the narrative hard to follow by the later chapters. The Precious Edition bundles the base game with the Sindarin voice-over DLC (which lets the elves speak Tolkien's constructed elvish language rather than English), a Lore Compendium, a digital artbook with over 100 sketches, the original soundtrack, and six Gollum-inspired emotes. The Sindarin DLC is the most meaningful add-on for lore purists, though the fact it isn't in the base game raised eyebrows at launch. The soundtrack itself is original, built around strings and woodwinds rather than mimicking the Howard Shore film scores, and it's probably the most consistently praised element of the whole package. Daedalic Entertainment publicly apologized the day after launch for the game's technical state, and the poor reception ultimately caused the studio to close its development division entirely. That context matters when you're deciding whether to spend money here. Post-launch patches addressed some instability, but the underlying design problems, bland level structure, dated visuals, and shallow mechanics are not things a patch can fix. If your Tolkien devotion is absolute and you genuinely want to experience Gollum's untold years, this is the only game that covers that ground. Everyone else will find better uses for their time.

Alex · Scout Team

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