I could do it to the mine master as he called me a worthless digger. I could do it to the beastmaster orc as he threatened to feed me to his monsters. I could walk into any orc in any corner of any room the game took me into. The orcs had some extra barks about how I wasn’t allowed near her, but there was absolutely nothing to actually stop me from wandering. In fact, I could walk endlessly into the legs of any NPC in the room, including the spooky lady. Any scraps of personality I found in the first few hours of Gollum were largely the ones I provided myself. He would just emit another NPC bark - like “Get moving, slave!” - and harmlessly whip his arm through his single animation again. He was a hulking, dimwitted goon, in a big stone-and-jagged-metal room, with a spooky lady in the center chanting, “The Eye sees all! The Eye knows all!”īut I could press the control stick forward and walk into his legs for as long as it amused me. A hunched and armored orc was yelling at me - Gollum - to get out of my cell and follow a line of slaves to a black iron elevator. Shortly after completing the tutorial of Gollum, I had been captured by Sauron’s ringwraiths (canon), tortured (canon), and thrown in the slave pit of Mordor (canon, not a spoiler!).

This was on my mind as I played The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Daedalic Entertainment’s new Lord of the Rings-inspired action-adventure game. No orc shouted “ Meat’s on the menu, boys!” in the books, but Peter Jackson’s film trilogy was right on the mark. The generic orc of generic fantasy may be a hulking, dimwitted goon, but they were Tolkien’s chief way of injecting humor into the darkest moments of The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien’s orcs is that they lacked personality.

Lord of the rings gollum ring