Episode 0: The Table of Contents, or: This Menu Does Not Have Meat On It

[ach_sss_no]

Table of Contents (you are here) | Next (Chapter 1)

(You can see/download PDFs of all posts here on Dropbox!)

Hello, I'm Cassie! I'm playing LOTR: Gollum so you don't have to!

I'm presuming that most of the people reading this found it through my Tumblr account, have already seen my blog, and have some idea of who I am and why I'm doing this; but it would be a mistake to presume that everyone who will ever read this will know all that, I think, so I have a brief explanation here if you're wondering. It is by no means required reading:
Click Now For Long-Winded Ramble In Your Area 

In this post: a table of contents. Below the table of contents I mumble a while about the game menu and the chapter select, and go through the collection items.

 WARNING! This is a full-spoiler Let's Play where entirely full and complete spoilers will be dropped without spoiler warnings whenever I feel like it! In general I am going to avoid talking about story events before we see them, but if I want to break that rule at any point I will break that rule. 

If you’re planning to play the game yourself or watch a commentary-less playthrough to see the story in something closer to its original format, I recommend you do that before you read this LP! I also recommend you do that anyway, at least a sample, because the voice acting is really entertaining.

 

OTHER WARNING: This game is T-rated, so it’s not too extreme. But it does include

please cue up the benny hill theme before reading onward 

violence, slavery, torture, murder, discussions of cannibalism, skeletons and corpses all over the place, an unflinching deep dive into a character with severe trauma & mental ill-health, a villain protagonist doing evil and selfish things, gross bodily conditions, psychological manipulation, severe emotional abuse, brainwashing, animal death, death caused by animals, a myriad of spiders, and lingering close-up shots of Gollum. The LP does too by extension. Gollum is unpleasant. His life has been unpleasant. Many things in his story are UNPLEASANT. We also spend a lot of time in Mordor, which is an unapologetic hell land where awful people do awful things. I am not going to give any further warnings from this point onward, the content is just going to happen as it happens. Keep going or don’t.

 

Episode 00 - The Let's Player, or: Why LOTR: Gollum Is Unironically My Game Of The Year (Because I Spent My Entire Yearly Video Game Budget On It)
Episode 0: The Table of Contents, or: This Menu Does Not Have Meat On It (you are here)

Part 1: Mordor, where the Shadows Lie

Episode 1: Chapter 1 - The Wraith, or: The One Who Simply Walked Into Mordor
Episode 2: Chapter 2 - The Maggot, part 1, or: Mordor's Official Guide to Cow-Tipping
Episode 3: Chapter 2 - The Maggot, part 2, or: GROND! GROND! GROND! GROND! GROND!
Episode 4: Chapter 3 - The Breeder, or: listen you pervert. he's dumping some puppy chow in the river for the swimming fetus piglet orcs it's NOT LIKE THAT
Episode 5: Chapter 4 - The Veteran, or: Hi, Grashneg, I'm Hungry 
Episode 6: Chapter 5 - The Traitor, or: The Sewer Level
Episode 7: Chapter 6 - The Spider, or: The Traitor Again

Intermission

Part 2: Mirkwood, where the Elveses Die

Episode 8: Chapter 7 - Good as Fish, part 1, or: Smelly Cat
Episode 9: Chapter 7 - Good as Fish, part 2, or: The King and I
Episode 10: Chapter 8 - Her Eyes, or: The Feel When No GF
Episode 11: Chapter 9 - Sméagol (and Gollum), or: Stinker v. Slinker
Episode 12: Chapter 10 - The Friend, or: No One Mourns The Wicked
Episode 13: The End and Credits - We Cannot Get Out.

Addendum: some fanart I did for the game, hosted on my Tumblr    

 (Note: The chapters in the game vary somewhat in length, so the table of contents may change if I decide some of the chapters need two posts after I see the amount of screencaps they need.)

 

OK, let's boot up the game and talk a little bit about some of the miscellany in the menu and such before we get started properly. If this doesn't interest you, by all means, you can go straight to Chapter 1: Chapter 1 is not yet posted. I just lied to you.

Right off the bat we have an issue:

  

...Fortunately, this error message appears to be somewhat in error. I've had no trouble running the game aside from a few sticky spots that always occur in the same areas and seem like they're due to poor optimization. I’m holding out a faint hope that they will one day get improved with a patch, perhaps, although it has now been 2 months since launch and nothing yet.
These issues are always temporary and didn't prevent me from completing the game twice (and going back in for collectibles) before starting this LP.

So let's proceed anyway.

 

The Great Eye sees all and remembers all.

In addition to the icon, there is a soft clinking sound when your game saves, which is nice because the icon is tiny in the corner and can be easy to overlook.

 

The main menu screen is fairly minimalistic, but there a few items of interest.

Most obviously: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

 

 A little mood music: It started with a hobbit, in Gollum's cave of gloom.

This visual design for the character is... fine. He's rather ugly, as he should be, and in face and form very much like looks like a hobbit that's having some issues, which is what he is. I prefer my Gollums a little more creative looking and this one is underwhelming when you're looking at him just sitting there. It's OK. I think he looks better within the context of the game's environments, and when contrasted with the relative normalcy of the other characters, and when he's in motion. (Not seeing him in motion is the downside of a screenshot LP, I'll make sure to post gifs when he does anything really interesting.) He conveys what he needs to for the story. He's functional. Also, I suspect that if they got too crazy with him they would have ran into modeling issues which they have enough of already. Generally, the design in this game is fine-to-great and the execution is the problem. Gollum’s model looks better than some of the others.

Positive: I do like his scummy little shorts. Sort of. They look like they were cobbled together from rags, and he has a little pouch he's wearing to keep collectibles, rocks and bugs in. (Yes those are shorts. It's not a loincloth. You get a way better look at the shorts than I needed in some cutscenes and those I won't be screencapping)

I said I like them 'sort of' because while the shorts look neat they are also the most detailed thing on his body and have high color contrast. So they draw the eye, right to the pelvic area. Whether you think that's a problem is up to you, I suppose; I would rather highlight anything else on the character, but that's OK. It's not always a problem- during gameplay you're looking at the environment and when you're looking at Gollum your eye is usually drawn to the awkward pageboy bowl cut before the shorts. In cutscenes, you're frequently looking down on the character from above while he crouches on the ground, and his lower body is tucked underneath him & not very visible. And the highest-detail area with the most contrast is then his face, so you look there, as you should... at other times, though, this is a problem.

Other positive: You will quickly see that the facial animations in this game... are not good. They are stiff and inexpressive.
(This is a positive?) Yes, the exception to that is Gollum, our ''''''hero'''''', who achieves some surprisingly subtle facial acting considering what his face looks like. I don't know a whole lot about motion capture, so there's not a ton I can say about this, but his voice actor, Wayne Forester is also credited with face capture. Some of this design is probably crafted to accommodate that acting.

He's not doing it here on the menu screen because nothing is happening for him to react to. Shhh... just trust me...

Overall I'm giving this Gollum's visual design a six out of tennnn it's closer to a five than a seven!

There's one thing I want to point out: Gollum has normal-looking feets. They are not webbed.

Should they be? Well, probably. Tolkien doesn't give too many concrete details of what Gollum looked like. We know he has a thin pale face, and large pale eyes that gleam green when he feels particularly evil, and thin lank hair of indeterminate color and length, and pockets, and he is very scrawny and emaciated.

(Gollum is also supposed to have dark clothing according to supplemental material. This explains the visual descriptions of 'dark all over except for his pale face', but clothing is not described in the actual text of LOTR, and to my knowledge no one has ever given Gollum a full set of clothing in the past *checks original publication date of the first edition The Hobbit* Almost One Hundred years, 

so I'm happy to concede that point. Sometimes it's fine to just go with the accepted cultural idea of something rather than the original text)

This design is accurate to all of that: pale face, pale eyes that look green sometimes, thin lank hair. But there's something missing:

 "It must make haste, haste!" said Gollum, beginning to climb out of his boat on to the shore to get at Bilbo. But when he put his long webby foot in the water, a fish jumped out in a fright and fell on Bilbo's toes.

- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

 What's more, it wasn't a log, for it had paddle-feet, like a swan's almost, only they seemed bigger, and kept dipping in and out of the water.

- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

This isn't a criticism, per se, it just strikes me as odd- not just because the game didn't give him webbed feet, but moreso because I don't think I've ever seen him with webbed feet in an officially licensed adaptation outside of the Rankin Bass version. No one does it. I don't know why no one does it. It's such an easy detail to throw in. I don't know. Weird. It makes sense to me why people have universally assumed the feral cave-dweller would be naked, but why leave out the webbed feet?

But I digress. If you don't like that kind of digression this may not be the LP for you

 

Now, the settings menu- basic stuff. There are no difficulty settings.

 

I did not know this previously & the game didn't explain it: Dynamic resolution and texture streaming are both performance improvement settings and you probably want them both to be turned ON.

There is a specific visual setting for 'Gollum hair simulation'. it is disabled by default on first launch of the game, when every other setting is set to 'on, super on, cranked up, ultra quality' by default.

So... what happens when we turn it in? ...Nothing bad. Sorry to disappoint you. Nothing bad happens, Gollum gets hair physics and it looks fine and nothing is wrong with it. His little screwed-up pageboy haircut flips around when he jumps it's kinda cute. It hasn't caused me any additional performance issues. I'll just assume this glitches horrifically if you have less RAM or a worse graphics card than I do. I've seen the Shrek animation glitches. I can imagine.

Settings can all be on 'ultra' on my system if I'm in an area of the game that doesn't have optimization issues, otherwise they all go to 'low' while I pray.

Controls:




The camera goes ballistic if the mouse sensitivity is too high. This has been common across many different games for me, might be my drivers, maybe I just swing my mouse around like a madwoman, who knows.

 

Also, Gollum crouching is set to 'toggle' because if I set it to 'hold' my hand will slip off of the key and precious will sit up like 'here I am :)' in the middle of a field of hostile orcs. 

 

Next: Chapter selection. LOTR: Gollum is autosave-only, which I'm assuming is for technical reasons. It saves pretty frequently. You cannot have multiple save files, but you can go back and revisit any chunk of the game you've completed, and make a do-over with your story choices from that point onwards. I found the autosave to be... fine... while playing. I would prefer if I could freely save the game, but then again this does keep me from losing a huge chunk of progress because I forgot to save...

 

The chapter selection lets you go in and replay any scene you've completed from any chapter you've unlocked. You can use this to go back and see different dialog, grab collectibles, etc.

 

I don't want to say much about the DLC, because the marketing and pricing of this game is just... a big ball of issues Unrelated To What I Want To Talk About which is the story. I will say that I only own the base game, and it is a complete work- I’ve seen the idea going around that the game is incomplete without the DLC, and that’s just not true, though the marketing of the DLCs may have caused a reasonable misunderstanding on that point. The DLCs appear to strictly be cosmetic additions or behind-the-scenes content. I may one day check out the lore compendium & art showcase DLCs if they are deeply discounted, because I am interested in the thought processes and choices behind this game, but I have no interest in the other things. 

So that leaves one last thing in the menu to talk about. Last but not least, I want to show you the collectibles. Gollum is an acquisitive little guttersnipe and he picks up trash. This is a trait from the books, which always intrigued me because, while it's a small thing, it does show that the character has something a little more left in him than just the motivation to have the Ring and keep himself alive so he can keep looking for/having the Ring, because many of these objects are of absolutely no survival value or any other kind of value. Gollum just liked them for whatever reason and now he's carrying them around with him. So, while it is a minor thing, I think it would have been a shame to overlook this trait and I'm glad that the game has it. It shows a certain level of care and attention that this character usually does not get.

(Here's the proof:)

"S-s-s-s-s," said Gollum more upset than ever. He thought of all the things he kept in his own pockets: fishbones, goblins' teeth, wet shells, a bit of bat-wing, a sharp stone to sharpen his fangs on, and other nasty things. He tried to think what other people kept in their pockets.

"Knife!" he said at last.

~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

 You can collect all of those things in the game (not the knife. that's what other people keep in their pockets).

The collectible items have nothing to do with the plot and largely have little to do with the locations they're found in. So I am going to go through the collection items now, because I think they make a fun little intro to how the game is presenting the main character. Whether or not I show you any of the collection spots in-game depends on how much of a pain they are to get to, how interesting they are, and whether or not I remember where they are. The nice thing is that once you've found a collectible, it's still unlocked even if you have to reset to a checkpoint before you grabbed it, so you never have to re-collect them unless you start a new file entirely.

Here are all the items.


I was not savvy enough to find all of these myself, I looked up a guide. Shout out to this comprehensive guide. It's in French, by the way. My French is not great, but you don't need to share a language to understand video footage of 'here is where is the thing in the level, go here'. The universal language of Steam achievements. 

Presumably, Gollum is carrying all of these in the pouch on his belt from the point when you pick them up until the end of the game. (He constantly fidgets and scratches his arms on this screen, by the way, which makes me wonder if his odd biology can support fleas.)

He has a short voice line for each item, which he says upon acquisition. You can replay the line at any time by selecting and inspecting the item.

The first object you can collect turned out to be 'a sharp stone to sharpen his fangs on'

 

"Can make our teeth sharp again with this one."
It's findable in the tutorial area. I came across it on my own shortly into my first playthrough and I clapped when I saw it. I know what that is!

"Old... and sticky! But we can make some strings out of them perhaps."
'Borocs' are Mordor cattle, seemingly invented for this game. 


"Nasty little shrieker... like in the old times of the Orcses deep under Misty Mountains..."
His line for the bat wing is basically 'It's like the one I had in the The Hobbit!'

 
"Nice leather for shoes. But we needs no shoes..."
I'm not entirely sure how he knows what shoes are.


"Scraps of metal. Orcses made that for the big war machine..."


"Bird feather. Mmh. We likes tasty birdses."

Here's something I desperately wish we could zoom in on:

"The thief Baggins. Ha! We hates it. But doesn't really look like him..."
 

A sketch of Bilbo Baggins! Doesn't look much like him, though, according to Gollum.

(Doesn't look much like other Bilbos I've seen either. There's no design of Bilbo shown in this game aside from this canonically-inaccurate sketch. Bilbo Baggins is Sir Not-appearing-in-this-game, and so is Aragorn despite the game covering the window of time in which Aragorn would have been involved. I am suspicious that the devs may have been restricted in which characters they were allowed to depict in-game. To be fair, if Aragorn was involved the whole sequence would have been 'Press Q to bite Aragorn. Press Q to be bound and gagged and dragged through the mud. Press Q to be dumped in a cell.' But it seems a little odd that we don't see him at all. There's not even as much as a brief shot of him from the back or an offscreen line. I would love to see road-trip-with-Aragorn DLC, the more terribly put together the better/funnier, but they’re never getting funding to add on to this game. Never.)

 
"Spider eyes! Maybe SHE [Shelob] will like it. She's lost some..." 
 I don't think Shelob would like that. I don't think anyone would like that.

 

"Orcses build all their things with these, always nails."
Gollum sounds slightly mystified at the existence of one of the most normal items in Middle-Earth.


"Boroc lost a tooth. We lost most of ours, too."
Gollum has six teeth total (both in the books and in this game). He uses them very effectively.

"More metal scraps. They are nice and shiny, my dear[referring to himself]. Let's keep them!"
We did it! We have a literal 'I grabbed it cuz its shiny'! 

"Is it tasty, my love[referring to himself]? No. Dead and dry. [keeps it anyway]" 


"Orc tooth. Full of holes, but very strong, my precious..."


"Not much use anymore. But who knows? [crams it into shorts]"


"Woodmen made nice carvings for children. Very nice."


"We used to eat those at home, long time ago. Before they sent us away, gollum!"



If you're here, you probably are familiar with the character, but just in case you don't get this reference: Gollum used to live in a hobbit village but they kicked him out, because he killed his cousin to get the One Ring, but then he hid the body and got away with murder, but then he started using the Ring and being such a jerk that his family kicked him out for that instead. (That's what happened in the books. The game uses book canon, and so do I.)
I think the writing in the game stands on its own without requiring more than a general cultural knowledge of what this character is- they re-state anything you really need to know about him to understand the story. But these collectible items are, of course, not part of the story and are freer to include Easter eggses for people who read the Shadow of the Past chapter of FOTR fifteen times. 


"Only bones. Nice fish is gone."


"Elves makes terrible sounds with it. We better keep it."
Now if only they had committed to the bit, and made Gollum make little cat-bell-collar noises permanently once this item was acquired. 

If this game ever becomes moddable I am going to do so many very specific and useless things to it


"From the harpses. Very strong."
When you go into Gollum's cave, keep your hand at the level of your eyes.


"Beautiful stone, but cold. Like the Elf King."




"Grandmother used to wear these. Ssss."

Gollum (or Sméagol, as he was known at the time) was raised by his grandmother. His parents' whereabouts are never accounted for by Tolkien that I know of. Perhaps they took one look at their son and said 'this was a mistake'.
I think this is the only reference to Sméagol's grandmother in the whole game.


"Baggins wore them on his belly, funny things."


"Ss. Tiny part of a much bigger thing. Don't pay attention and I sting."
This splinter is a bit of an oddity in-game. Every other item is picked up when you just. find it somewhere. and pick it up.
This splinter requires Gollum to:

1. walk over a specific patch of floor
2. yell OW OOF OUCH MY FEETS
3. the splinter becomes collectible
4. Gollum feels moved by the muse Polyhymnia, recites a riddle-poem to the splinter
5. Gollum keeps this splinter for the rest of his life as a treasured keepsake

"Elf King likes these. Always alone with lots of shiny pearls in his lonely palace."

 
"Digs deep, never weeps... What was it?... Badger!"


"Twig and flower. What was the word again? Lost it, my love. We are getting old."
...is he looking for the word 'branch'? I'm not all that old and I'm confused. Also, wondering why he wants this.


"Badger ate it already. Poor bird."


"Maybe Riddlemaster made this. Looks like things in his rooms."
The Riddlemaster is a character created for the game. We will meet him much much later, and yes, this does look like it could be his handiwork.


"From Elvish pots. All broken... All dead."


"Elf feasting with this. We keeps it, remembering nice cook."


The cook is also an invented character we will meet much later. 


"What's this for?"


"Squirrel food. Let's keep it for bad times."
SPOILER: Bad times for Gollum are happening currently, have been happening for the past five centuries and will only end with his fiery death


"Hookses. Good for fishing."


"How did we get so old and thin, my precious?"
This is the final collectible you can pick up in the game and your reward for getting them all is some light Gollum angst.

 

Well, that is all I have to say about the menu. See you all next week-ish to start the game proper!

Table of Contents (you are here) | Next (Chapter 1)

Comments

[greatwhitespider]

(pls ignore I'm commenting with a giant spider rp account)

I'm glad you're making this! I wouldn't have given this game a second thought but it and the choices it makes are pretty interesting, actually. I don't really understand why it got quite the level of backlash that it did. It reminds me a bit of some of the backlash to the Star Wars prequels - a lot of people were mad that Darth Vader had ever not just been a stone badass all his life. I like him a lot better as someone who's badass, sure, but also a rather pathetic person who is the architect of his own misery in a lot of ways, that's much more interesting.

Are most of the people who like playing Middle-Earth games just in it for feeling cool and powerful? That might be it. But there are plenty of games for that, tbh.

[ach_sss_no]

This is an appropriate place to use a spider rp account I think XD

You're right, it does have the Star Wars prequels vibe!

I think sometimes people just find it a little unpleasant or confusing when a familiar story is given a new installment that recontextualizes it (especially if the original creator is not involved), which is understandable- but then again I feel like this particular game is very easy to ignore if desired. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I understand not vibing with this game but I do find it sad that the amount of backlash may have discouraged people who would have been its audience from checking it out.

[greatwhitespider]

she's not from a good canon but I love this spider for very blatantly being a combination of Shelob and Galadriel lmao

Yeah. The way people talk about it when it's trying something so different, and the example its failure sets, are kinda sad really. I guess Tolkien games will be all taking cues from the movies all power fantasy for a good while now. I bet the world in which GDT had made The Hobbit (he was going to go with a different visual direction than the PJ films) is kinder to this sort of endeavor.

[ach_sss_no]

;_; dont remind me of the lost GDT hobbit! I weep for it!