YMMV / The Lord of the Rings: Gollum

• Accidental Innuendo: The subplot about Gollum being made to hatch a bird's egg is introduced by an orc telling Gollum to go the "the breeding halls", followed by repeated dialogue about how "you don't want to make him wait." The ambiguity in the lines of what is being bred (especially since the most immediate conclusion is Gollum himself) can spark a lot of giggles.
• Adaptation Displacement:
  • One of many criticisms of the game is that the visuals aren't based on the Peter Jackson movies, but rather use a very stylized, cartoony original art style and character designs of its own creation. Besides LEGO The Lord of the Rings — which is still based heavily on the films — the last Lord of the Rings video game to do so was probably The Hobbit way back in 2003 (which wasn't particularly highly rated by reviewers either).
  • Similarly, Wayne Forester's performance as Gollum has received mixed reactions for not matching the films — while it's agreed Forester is a talented actor, Andy Serkis's performance has been so thoroughly ingrained into pop culture that many players found it jarring how Forester doesn't imitate it at all, sounding much more like Riki at times.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: When the game was first announced, many fans were actively wondering why it was being made. Gollum is certainly an iconic character, but not one many believed could carry a game by himself, as every version of the story depicts him as unlikeable and pathetic. Being a stealth game with no combat (a rather niche genre for games) that is also developed by a company with no experience with a game of this scale, and still launching at full price didn’t help sell people either. This, alongside the Obvious Beta nature of the game at launch and the cash-grabby monetization, led to the game selling very poorly.
  Yahtzee: To be honest, I'm hard-pressed to envision how a game about Gollum could've worked. On the narrative level, one can get behind a nasty, effective protagonist or a nice, ineffectual one, but nasty and ineffectual? That's just depressing, even before I had to watch the little scrote die an average of fifty times an hour, knowing that his eventual lifelong peak will only come after he bites a finger off a nice, pretty Elijah Wood.
• Bile Fascination: This game quickly became one of the worst-reviewed games of 2023 and a contender for worst game of the decade, which may have helped in it getting more notoriety than it deserved, even among players who are normally not familiar with or fond of Tolkien's Legendarium.
• Complete Monster:
  • Sauron is the Dark Lord of Mordor, who rules over the land with an exceptionally cruel system of slavery. Thousands of captured prisoners are subject to humiliating, back-breaking, and lethal labor on a daily basis, forced to wrangle ravenous beasts and go on suicide missions to set off explosives. Additionally, batches of dozens of prisoners are vaporized every hour, their bloody remains used to keep the "dark water" rivers of Mordor constantly flowing. Sauron's forces overthrew Lestor's kingdom and killed his people many years ago, and Sauron turned Lestor into one of his chief torturers, "the Candle Man", while poisoning his daughter against him. With a long history of waging war on all life of Middle-earth, Sauron tortures the broken creature Gollum at the start of the game, and later gives the Mouth free reign to order the decimation of Mirkwood and other kingdoms, all in his quest to reclaim his One Ring.
  • The Mouth of Sauron, having willingly joined the Dark Lord's cause as his lieutenant of the Dark Tower, facilitates the Barad-dûr slave pits under the control of the Candle Man. Allowing thousands of prisoners to be enslaved and put under harsh conditions and punishments to increase Sauron's army for an eventual war, upon Gollum's escape, the Mouth orders the Candle Man to attack numerous Elven kingdoms to retrieve Gollum, which leads to the decimation of Mirkwood with few survivors.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: Shortly after the game launched, fans dug up a pre-alpha screenshot showing an earlier version of Gollum's model and the game's UI. Many people voiced a strong preference for this earlier rendition, with Gollum bearing a closer resemblance to his film counterpart and the UI making use of actual Lord of the Rings imagery rather than using a default font.
• Fandom Rivalry: A strange example, considering both games are considered pretty awful, but when Skull Island: Rise of Kong came out months later, "fans" debated on which game was the worse of the two, with many calling Rise of Kong "the next Gollum." Coincidentally, both games are based on franchises that Peter Jackson had made films for, and both characters were played by Andy Serkis.
• Memetic Loser: Take Gollum, a character who is already an Unpopular Popular Character, and make him the protagonist of a video game whose fanbase mostly stems from Bile Fascination, and a lot of the fun people have with the game comes from watching Gollum die in all kinds of amusing and/or glitchy ways. It's common for this game's version of Gollum to be portrayed as a complete ineffectual loser as a result.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • 6 Iconic Gestures and Sayings. ^ExplanationPrior to release, a screenshot of the Stream store page promising "Predorder The Lord of the Rings: Gollum™️ to receive the Emotes Pack DLC, which includes 6 of his most iconic gestures and sayings" became viral, both due to being an blatant cashgrab and amusingly artificial wording, ala Aiden Pearce's Iconic Hat. Post-release it's become a way to make fun of the game's perceived failings, such as asking if a bad animation or bit of dialogue is an iconic gesture or saying.
  • Calibri interface. ^ExplanationThe game's interface makes heavy use of Calibri, famous for being the default font in both Microsoft Office and Xsplit. This, in addition to being mocked as a lazy and poor design choice, made it incredibly easy to create fake but authentic-looking screenshots of the game to use in memes, which often make fun of its poor quality.
  • "Gollum won the argument." ^ExplanationThe game features a mechanic where both of Gollum's personalities will argue over what course of action to take, and the player has to choose the right dialogue options to get the optimal outcome. Gollum winning the argument is accompanied by a smug-looking graphic of his face, which has gained some traction as a meme about giving into impulsive thinking or about the pointlessness of arguing on the internet.
  • Gollum on Normal Pills. ^ExplanationA number of players noticed that Gollum's default expression looks uncannily similar to an already memetic screenshot of Dream as he appears in the music video for his song "Mask". The similarities between the two faces resulted in many people jokingly portraying Gollum as the video's version of Dream, in particular claiming that the reason why he looks off compared to his film counterpart is because he took "normal pills", the video's stand-in for Dream's ADHD medication.
  • The day after the game came out, the developers released an apology on Twitter, stating that they would release patches to fix various bugs and make other improvements. This apology for the game's Obvious Beta status has become a meme to repost among gamers who are tired of seeing publishers put out apologies for releasing unfinished titles, which they find happens often enough that it no longer has any meaning. Later accusations of the entire apology being written by chatbot AI ChatGPT made this even worse, for (if true) it means that nobody even cared enough to actually write an apology for the game's release state.
  • The Lord of Ring: Gollum™. ^ExplanationPeople quickly noticed that the apology for the game's status contained a glaring typo in the first sentence, calling the game The Lord of Ring: Gollum. The error almost immediately became a widespread subject for parody thanks to people perceiving it as a case of Digging Yourself Deeper.
  • Orc Breeding. ^ExplanationThe "Lore Compendium" DLC, aside from the questionable decision to make the Lore Codex a $4.99 purchase, earned infamy for its Steam store page choosing to highlight its "Orc Breeding" article in a screenshot. It has thus become an easy joke to make when mocking the game's DLC practices.
  • Gollum is Riki. ^ExplanationOnce it was discovered that Gollum is voiced by Wayne Forester, who played Riki in Xenoblade Chronicles, Xenoblade fans reacted with a mix of amusement and horror, making fanart and edits that replace Gollum with Riki. This includes Vinny of Vinesauce, who briefly broke out into a Riki impression when streaming the game.
  • "Gollum! Breeding halls. Now." ^ExplanationA bizarre and poorly thought-through line one of the orcs says to the player. It spread like wildfire, quickly becoming one of the game's most remembered scenes for all the wrong reasons.
  • Gollumlike. ^note A snark labelling subsequently released licensed shovelware games as "Gollumlikes" (akin to Roguelike or Souls-like) by suggesting that The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was so notoriously terrible that it invented a new genre of bad video games. Skull Island: Rise of Kong, The Walking Dead: Destinies and Jujutsu Kaisen: Cursed Clash were some such games mockingly given this title.
• Narm: The game on a few occasions uses slow-motion to accentuate big, risky jumps that Gollum makes. Not necessarily a bad editing flourish in other contexts, but the fact that the game is giving Gollum of all characters the action movie 'slow-motion leap away from explosions' treatment turns it into unintentional hilarity.
• Obvious Beta: The game's launch was buggy to the point of some reviewers being unable to even finish it, with clipping issues, frame drops, failed triggers, crashes, and falling out of the map. The optimization is also poor at best, with Gollum's requirements on PC being far higher than a game with its graphics should warrant. And this was after it was delayed for two years.
• Older Than They Think: The almost alien-like appearance of the elves may seem strange compared to the human-like image put forward by the Jackson films, but this was the most common depiction of elves during Tolkien's time; the animated The Hobbit and The Return of the King films from the 70s went with a similar appearance when depicting the elves. That said, this isn't a case of Truer to the Text, as descriptions in the books tend towards elves looking very much like attractive humans (to the point that it's a matter of real debate whether they were intended to look different from humans at all).
• Porting Disaster: The game is notorious for being a buggy mess no matter what you play it on, but the version on the Xbox Series S runs the worst of them all, running horribly even in performance mode, and the glitchy and stuttery animations, already a problem on the Series X and PS5, are even more unbearable on the Series S.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: The game was released to scathing reception from critics and audiences due to it being a virtually unplayable Obvious Beta with boring gameplay, poor visuals, and basic features that were locked behind paid DLC. Because it came out after a string of high-profile and well-received licensed games, it's become a common joke that Gollum feels like it should have come out at least ten years before it did, when this trope was more widespread.
• Scrappy Mechanic: For Emote Pack buyers, the fact that you cannot manually select what emote you want to play, as the game just randomly chooses one of the six animations instead. What amounts to an 'Idle Animation on command' feature isn't necessarily a bad idea, but the fact that this feature is locked behind a $2.99 DLC paywall pushes it into being heinously anti-consumer.
• Special Effect Failure: All over the place. Aside from the general low quality of the visuals, this is most clearly evident in the Frail Man's beard, which is stiff as a board and tends to flip back and forth between various positions that don't look right. There is also the fact that Gollum's pathetic circle of hair around his skull can actually clip through the environment, so his model will be walking through fog or smoke and the circle of hair floats through it as the only thing visible rather than his entire character model.
• They Changed It, So It Sucks: Some of the backlash to this game is simply because it doesn't use character designs from the Peter Jackson films, or ape the performances of its actors, but tries its own takes.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Even if one sets aside the terrible graphics, abundant glitches, and boring and poorly designed gameplay, many players feel that this is the primary problem with the game. It takes Gollum, a character whose mere existence is torture thanks to centuries of Mind Rape and corruption from an Artifact of Doom, and puts him through even more misery through getting enslaved and captured multiple times. It tries to offer some new insight into his character via a dialogue system, but the implementation is so counterintuitive and frustrating, and the results have so little bearing on the game's story that it becomes more frustrating than anything else.
• Ugly Cute: The baby bird that Gollum helps to hatch looks just as awkward as the rest of the game, but nonetheless manages to look cute due to its big eyes, friendliness, and resemblance to a nightjar chick.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley:
  • Gollum's design has been widely criticised for this reason. The character designers were clearly trying to take him in more of an Ugly Cute direction, but common consensus is that the design just doesn't get the balance between the two sides right, resulting in a character that looks more like an overgrown baby than a corrupted and destitute hobbit.
  • This applies to most characters in the game; while it makes some sense that Gollum and the Orcs would look off-putting, there's no excuse for the elves and humans.

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