In what has to be the most “what in the world” announcement in a while, Daedalic, the folks who are known for primarily developing point-and-click adventure games, have announced The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, a new game focusing on Gollum, on his quest to retrieve the One Ring between him losing it, and the events of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Unlike Daedalic’s usual work, Gollum is going to be an action-adventure game, but one that retains the narrative emphasis that the developer is known for regardless.
“You already have that big conflict in the character, two voices talking to you continuously, which means there is a good reason there are decisions to make in the game: the Smeagol decisions or the Gollum decision,” Carsten Fichtelmann, CEO and co-founder of Daedalic Entertainment, told The Hollywood Reporter.
“We have the story that we all know from the book, but everything that happens to him before he appears in the book are the main things we will see in our game,” Fichtelmann said. “We will tell the story before he first appears in the books.”
Which certainly sounds interesting enough. It sounds like the decisions of an adventure game could play a whole lot into the traditional action-adventure gameplay scenarios you expect from the genre. What’s also unusual about this game is that it will adopt a very unique visual look, unlike the photorealism that the Middle-Earth series of games has gone for.
“[Our goal is not to go] too deep into the uncanny valley,” he said. “When it comes to shapes, colors, we definitely try to produce something that is a statement.”
For now, the release date for the game is planned to be 2021, to coincide alongside a Lord of the Rings television show by Amazon for its Prime Video service (although that TV show is allegedly set in the Second Age, so Gollum won’t play too much into that). It’s planned for release on “all relevant consoles” and PC, which I will guess means PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Scarlett, Nintendo Switch, and PC—but that’s my guess, not an official confirmation.