If you were hoping to get a real glimpse of Middle Earth’s shadiest little gremlin at the Future Games Show this week, you might have been left either partially sated or a bit disappointed. Daedalic did show footage of Lord of the Rings: Gollum, like it hinted it was going to, but it was not much footage, and you might not be able to get a grasp on the game just from what you saw.
The trailer shown during the event was fairly short, but, to be fair, it was called a sneak peek. It also does give an idea of what the story of the game is moving forward. Gollum appears to be stuck in the tower of Barad-Dur, in Mordor, and is attempting to escape — presumably, this is set after he’s lost the One Ring to Bilbo Baggins and he was captured in Mordor.
The actual gameplay was shown in very shown, split-second clips. Everything else appeared to be mostly pre-rendered cutscene material. That’s not unusual for games at this stage in development. We did see footage of Gollum climbing around Barad-Dur and creeping around big Orcs, which is probably the lion’s share of the gameplay. I’m not the first person to draw the comparison to Styx: Master of Shadows, but I will add that if Styx made a cameo, I would praise the game to the moon and back.
Keep in mind the footage we saw was still not the finished product. The game itself is not going to be exactly like the game as it appears in this trailer. Supposedly Gollum’s split personality will play a role in the gameplay, but we didn’t see how exactly in the trailer. Gollum is, at the time of this writing, still set to be released on consoles and PC sometime in 2022.
