The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a buggy, joyless mess — and a contender for 2023’s worst game

After hours of dodging orcs and skittering spiders, I finally reached Shelob’s lair. Playing as a slave in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, I’d been reduced to fetching scraps, herding animals, and groveling for moldy bread. Meeting the spider queen felt like my one chance at freedom. I fed her another slave, hoping to strike a bargain. Instead, a cutscene triggered, Shelob instantly grabbed me, and I died before gameplay even resumed — twice: once in-game, and once in real life from laughing at the absurdity.

That jarring disconnect between cutscene and gameplay perfectly sums up Gollum. It’s a narrative-driven stealth-adventure that aims to capture the tortured existence of Tolkien’s most wretched character. Thematically, that’s compelling. Mechanically, it’s a disaster.

Shackled storytelling

Set between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, the story unfolds across 10 vignettes framed as a strange therapy session with Gandalf. Gollum/Sméagol trudges through Barad-dûr, Cirith Ungol, and other iconic locales, encountering both familiar and original characters. It’s a clever setup — freedom dangled as the ultimate prize — but the gameplay boils down to repetitive stealth, uninspired fetch quests, and banal puzzles.

Gollum can strangle an orc if it’s not wearing a helmet (a rule the game later ignores in its own cutscenes), but most encounters end in instant fail states. “Stealth-action” is generous: there’s plenty of stealth, almost no action, and zero fun.

Death by a thousand bugs

The controls are atrocious. Guiding Gollum feels like driving a car on ice. His climbing abilities are inconsistent, his momentum uncontrollable, and his platforming demands pixel-perfect accuracy the mechanics don’t support. You’ll die constantly — slipping off ledges, missing jumps, or simply because button prompts don’t register.

And then there are the literal bugs. Beyond the creepy-crawlies Gollum eats to heal, the game is riddled with glitches: sinking through platforms, freezing mid-animation, or being grabbed by orcs through solid walls. More than once I died instantly after a cutscene, with no chance to react. The forgiving checkpoints soften the blow, but replaying broken sequences again and again kills any motivation.

As I joked to friends: Gollum has killed me more times than Elden Ring.

Wasted potential

There are glimpses of something interesting. The game toys with Gollum’s fractured psyche, letting you choose whether to act as vicious Gollum or kinder Sméagol. These internal debates could’ve been powerful, but the outcomes barely matter — different choices lead to the same result. It’s the illusion of agency without the payoff.

Thematically, the game captures Gollum’s inner torment and obsession. Narratively, it even humanizes him at times. But clunky controls, meaningless choices, and endless bugs bury any spark of brilliance under layers of frustration.

Verdict

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a game of contradictions. It wants to be a platformer, but the platforming doesn’t work. It wants to be a stealth game, but the AI is laughably dumb. It wants to be an action game, but Gollum is too weak to fight. All of it is smothered under relentless glitches.

There’s potential buried somewhere deep in this broken package, but like its pitiful protagonist, the game is more misery than reward. Gollum doesn’t just fail to live up to Tolkien — it struggles to live up to the standards of gaming itself.