Speedrunners are competing to race through the notorious Gollum game, the worst-reviewed title of 2023 so far.
As reported by Kotaku, there’s currently a battle among speedrunners to see who can post the quickest completion time for The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. Considering that it’s the worst-reviewed game of the year so far, one imagines that they’re gluttons for punishment.
Then again, the game’s very notoriety is perhaps the attraction. Plus the fact that it’s full of glitches provides plenty of opportunity to exploit bugs and shave time off record speedruns. (Let’s face it, if you’re going to play Lord of the Rings: Gollum at all, it’s probably a good year to get the whole ordeal over and done with as quickly as possible.)
The game typically takes about 12 to 13 hours to finish, but the YouTuber WrldWideWasteland posted a run of under eight hours at the start of June, without the use of advanced techniques such as level skips.
With the gauntlet laid down, Twitch streamer EZScape stepped up with a run of his own. EZScape apparently spent around 125 hours practising for the run, hunting for glitches to exploit. In the end, he managed to achieve a time of 2 hours, 53 minutes and 3 seconds, beating WrldWideWasteland’s run by over five hours.
EZScape and WrldWideWasteland are currently the only two on the Speedrun.com scoreboard for The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. Who else will be foolhardy enough to attempt to break the record?
The Gollum game currently holds a score of 34 on Metacritic for PS5, and is the worst-reviewed game of 2023 so far. In fact, it was so bad that its developer, Daedalic Entertainment, has said it is going to give up developing games entirely, and will only publish them from now on.
Read more: Lord of the Rings: Gollum studio cancels game, ceases development
