Daedalic Entertainment, the developer responsible for the disastrously reviewed The Lord of the Rings: Gollum game released this week, already has its next project lined up. Some gamers might be surprised to learn that, despite the failings of Gollum, Daedalic's next game is also set in the Lord of the Rings universe.
Daedalic is a game developer based in Germany that has published several point-and-click adventure games since the company was founded in 2007. Originally scheduled to release in 2021, The Lord of the Ring: Gollum was Daedalic’s first game with a massively popular franchise IP. Gollum has been met with scathing reviews. Critics have complained about the game’s abundance of glitches, uninspired writing, and its dull, unimaginative gameplay.
Daedalic has since released a public letter to fans apologizing for the current abysmal state of Gollum and promised to fix its enormous number of technical failings at launch. But that won’t be stopping it from diving back into the Lord of the Rings universe. According to the website of Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Daedalic has received €2 million from the German government to develop a second game set in the Lord of the Rings universe. The game appears to center around the wizards of Middle-Earth, hence its codename: “It’s Magic.”
The website of Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action contains a brief and somewhat vague description of the project. The page claims that Daedalic’s next project takes players to “a lush world” of creatures and magic. It then suggests that “It’s Magic” will, like Gollum before it, tell its story from the perspective of a previously established Lord of the Rings character who has never had a story told from their point of view. Finally, the description promises that “It’s Magic” will see the player discovering “completely new regions.” This makes “It’s Magic” one of five Lord of the Rings games that will be released within the next two years.
Reception to The Lord of the Rings: Gollum has been dismal. According to reviews, Gollum not only seems poorly designed in a way that cannot be fixed with updates, but it is also a technical disaster that, for some reason, requires a preposterously beefy PC to play it properly. It will be interesting to see if Daedalic can, at the very least, release “It’s Magic” in a stable state by its current projected release date sometime in the second half of 2024 considering how much work the developer has left ahead when it comes to patching Gollum’s numerous issues.