Where are all the idyllic Lord of the Rings games?
How game designers are missing the point with all these grimdark Lord of the Rings adaptations
One of my great gaming guilty pleasures was the 2003 adaptation of The Hobbit. It wasn’t great — in fact, it was pretty a bad action platformer — but it allowed me to do something I’d never been able to do before (outside of the abysmal Fellowship of the Ring game on Super Nintendo, which is better left unmentioned): explore Middle-earth on my own. Of course my mind had wandered the fields of The Shire and the forests of Lorien and the caverns of the Misty Mountains for years, but digitally exploring every nook and cranny in Bag End was exhilarating and a whole new way to enjoy Tolkien’s world without the guiding hand of an authorial voice.
17 years later — the tone of Middle-earth-based games has changed.
The first screenshots from Daedalic Entertainment’s Lord of the Rings: Gollum appeared online today, and my first thought, besides being curious what a game might look like when it’s targeting next gen consoles, was a deep sigh of disappointment. Besides one single screenshot of a bright, earthy Mirkwood, the screenshots looked a lot like what I’ve come to expect from Middle-earth games over the past decade: dark, gritty, and unpleasant.
