I was perusing some video game news when I saw the headline “The Lord of the Rings: Gollum Dev Daedalic Ends Internal Development to Focus on Publishing“. At first, I didn’t think too much of it, thinking that it made sense given the issues surrounding that game, but then I suddenly came to a realisation and made an audible “Noooooo!” As you can imagine, the closure of Daedalic Entertainment’s development division breaks my heart and so I thought I might explain how this came to happen and why it breaks my heart.
For those of you who might not be aware of who Daedalic Entertainment are, I’d direct you to an article I wrote about them sometime ago. To quickly summarise though, Daedalic Entertainment is a German video game publisher and, now, former developer who began making point and click games such as Edna & Harvey, The Whispered World and Deponia to name a few. It was announced in 2019 that they would be developing and releasing a new Lord of the Rings game which featured Gollum as the main character. The game finally released this year and received a critical thrashing and, while no sales figures were provided, we can assume that it sold poorly enough that Daedalic Entertainment decided to stop making games and to just publish instead.
I always thought it was an odd choice for Daedalic to take on and it was only later that I learned that Daedalic had developed games in other genres such as Blackguards (tactical role-playing) and The Long Journey (space roguelike role-playing). Even then, I viewed Gollum as being a make or break moment for the studio as it appeared to be much higher budget than their previous products as well as eating up a massive chunk of their development time with no game developed by them releasing in either 2021 or 2022. I had hoped that, regardless of how it was received, that it’d do well enough that Daedalic wouldn’t have to shut down. I guess I only partially got my wish as they continue to exist but only as a publisher.
This is tragic to me as I only just started getting back into point and click games with the Monkey Island games recently spurring me to try Daedalic Entertainment’s games and falling head over heels in love with Edna & Harvey while enjoying the other games that I’ve played so far such as The Whispered World and Deponia. I still have a lot of their point and click games lined up but it’ll be sad to know that there’ll be no more to look forward to once I’ve worked through them.
Still, it’s also worth noting that Daedalic Entertainment hadn’t developed a point and click adventure game since 2017 so it’s also possible that Daedalic Entertainment had lost the interest or talent in order to develop these types of games. However, I’d hoped that, if Daedalic Entertainment kept going, we might see them return to the genre someday but, with the closing of their development division, that hope is pretty much extinguished. I’ll continue to enjoy the games they made but I can’t view this news as anything but tragic.
Let me know your thoughts on the reasons why the closure of Daedalic Entertainment’s development division breaks my heart, which of the games they developed you’ve played, what you thought of them, whether you also share my sorrow at the loss of their development division and any additional thoughts you might have on the topic.
Thanks for reading and if you wish to seek any of the titles I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs! Also feel free to follow my curator page on Steam “JRPG Reviews” for thoughts and opinions on any JRPGs that I play and my YouTube channel “Victory Achieved Gaming” where I guide my friend through challenging games.