There’s been no shortage of The Lord of the Rings games over the years, but precious few of them focus on the real stars of J. R. R. Tolkien’s books, the humble hobbits. Granted, outside of the unlikely adventures of the Baggins family, hobbits are known for living rather unexciting lives, so perhaps it’s not surprising that game makers would rather focus on Middle-earth’s elves, orcs, and dragons. But, of course, not all games have to focus on action and excitement – enter Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game, a new cozy life sim in the vein of Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing that aims to celebrate hobbit life in all its sleepy glory.
Does Tales of the Shire successfully carve out its own cozy corner of Middle-earth? Or does it confirm why Tolkien’s books never stayed in the Shire for long? Venture forth for the answer…
Tales of the Shire begins with players creating their own furry-footed avatar before putting down stakes in Bywater, the neighboring settlement to the more famous Hobbiton. I suspect most folks who hear the phrase “cozy life sim set in the Lord of the Rings universe” will make some similar assumptions – that the game will have a richer, more developed world and cast of characters than your average life sim, and that it might mix a bit more adventure in with the usual farming and mushroom picking. Sadly, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
While Tolkienites will no doubt recognize some names from the books and movies – the crusty Old Noakes and Samwise Gamgee’s eventual wife Rosie Cotton being chief among them – the game doesn’t expand on these characters in any interesting way. There are a number of nameless NPCs that wander around Bywater, but there are only 15 characters you can actually interact with and they’re all lifelessly written, with most having perhaps a single identifying trait (and sometimes not even that). There's no real conflict, no real drama, everyone just speaks in dry awkward sentences and empty platitudes.
Most who play Tales of the Shire will likely start making a mental list of all the things you’d expect from a proper cozy farming game that you won’t find here, such as mining, festivals, livestock (aside from chickens), and romance, to name just a few. The one thing Tales of the Shire has going for it, really the only thing, is cooking. The game takes hobbits being hungry little buggers to the extreme by having basically everything revolve around food.
The only way to raise your relationship level with your fellow hobbits is to invite them over for a meal. The main way to earn new recipes, tools, house and garden expansions, and other upgrades in Tales of the Shire is to increase these relationships or boost your ranking in a series of food-related clubs (there are cooking, farming, fishing, and foraging clubs). Basically, if you want to get ahead, everything circles back to your kitchen, which may sound like a smart, focused approach, but in this game it just feels overly simplistic. Nobody in Bywater feels like a real character, they’re just walking stomachs.
To be fair, this game’s cooking mechanics actually work pretty well. In addition to finding and mixing the right ingredients, players also have to decide how “smooth” or “chunky” they want to cut things, how long proteins should be cooked, and what seasonings to add. Dinner guests have certain dish and flavor profile preferences and combining certain tastes will result in more pleasing dishes. The complexity of making dinner steadily increases as more recipes, ingredients, and cooking implements are introduced, eventually becoming relatively involved.
Once you have some dishes whipped up, you’ll invite guests to one of several different dining venues, place their meals in front of them, perhaps add some decorations for ambiance, and then, bon appétit! The whole cooking and dining process is actually rather satisfying, but does it make up for everything else Tales of the Shire doesn’t do or simply does poorly? Absolutely not, but when you're chopping up veggies and setting the table you do get a brief glimpse of what this experience perhaps could have been with a bit more ambition, time, and support from management (a recent article from The Verge details the game’s rocky development).
The only other way to progress in Tales of the Shire is to work through the game’s “campaign,” such as it is. The big dilemma driving said campaign is… whether Bywater will be officially designated a village. Nothing more thrilling than the civic bureaucratic process! Story missions are almost entirely fetch-quest busy work of the most mind-numbing variety, with only occasional requirements to cook a meal breaking things up.
As barebones as the rest of Tales of the Shire is, I’ll admit, there were times when the cozy formula still kicked in and provided some moments of low-key enjoyment, but ultimately, the game’s dead-fish campaign truly killed the experience for me. Tales of the Shire makes the same mistakes so many middling cozy games make – it’s so mellow, it lacks any form or direction, so friendly and nonthreatening that everything just turns to mush. Sure, actually-good cozy games like Stardew Valley are fairly chill, but they’re not uneventful or vapid. The promise of the hobbit life sim concept just makes the bland monotony served up by this game sting all the more.
Tales of the Shire doesn’t even impress on a technical level, which is surprising given Weta Workshop has won Oscars for its work on the LotR movies. While Bywater looks decent enough from afar, upon closer inspection, you’ll find everything’s made up of chunky polygons and blurry textures the likes of which haven’t regularly been seen in a few hardware generations. Despite this lack of visual pizazz, the game runs terribly on the PS5 (I can only imagine how rough the Switch version must be) and is rife with visual glitches.
You can experience all the thrills of Tales of the Shire’s main campaign within around 15 hours, but, of course, you’re free to while away your time in Bywater for as long as you please. That said, I suspect most will be begging for a wizard to come give them something better to do before long.
This review was based on a PS5 copy of Tales of the Shire provided by publisher Private Division.
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