Bucking the fantasy hero trend with The Lord of the Rings: Gollum

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Gollum is not the sort of character who typically headlines a video game. Most games protagonists are heroic figures, power fantasies for the players that can take on great numbers of evil foes and triumph with barely a dent in their health bar.

The works of JRR Tolkien are not short of such figures, from wizards and kings to elven archers and dwarven warriors. And yet Daedalic Entertainment sought to centre its Lord of the Rings game – one of the most ambitious projects in the company's history, as we were told last year – around a gaunt and wretched creature.

"There's this preconception at the beginning, 'Who would want to play Gollum? It's not interesting'," Daedalic's level designer Nika Dvoravic tells GamesIndustry.biz when we catch up with her at Reboot Develop Blue to have a chat about the prospect of building a game world for a seemingly underpowered character.

"There's this preconception at the beginning, 'Who would want to play Gollum? It's not interesting'"

"But he's so versatile, so agile. It's realistic that he can actually get from this point up to that balcony. After you solve the first level, you instantly get that feeling. He is like a little piece of rubber, and he can get thrown around. I think the player will start feeling empathy towards him, because this game gives you the humanity of Gollum as well, because he's a complex character."

While there are some combat abilities in Daedalic's The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, the titular character is unable to take on hordes of orcs by himself, so the focus is more on stealth and traversal – there's even some parkour.

Many fantasy games have shifted towards an open-world format