| Quick Verdict: I’m so torn on Tales of the Shire. In some ways, it’s an exceedingly charming game that’s great for a few hours of gameplay. In other ways, it’s a bit lifeless and has some gameplay designs that don’t make the best sense. It’s not the worst game or best game I’ve ever played, it’s very meh. |
| Game: | Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game |
| Developer(s): | Wētā Workshop |
| Publisher: | Private Division |
| Review Score: | 6 |
| Cozy Score: | 7 |
| Price: | $34.99 |
| Pros: | The graphics are charming, the vibes are cozy, and I adore a fetch-quest-based game. |
| Cons: | You can’t turn off vibration in the controller for fishing, you can’t jump down from a higher place, the bird guiding system needed to be constant rather than birds swooping in to guide the way, no fast travel, and the task list isn’t quite detailed enough. |
| Platforms: | PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox |
| Genres: | Life Sim, Farming Sim |
Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game (henceforth just Tales of the Shire) is a cozy game that had a lot of things go right and a lot of things go wrong. I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t address the elephant in the room and that’s the game getting delayed twice before finally getting released. It’s hard not to put a finer microscope on a game originally slated to come out in Fall 2024.
In Tales of the Shire, you start out as a Hobbit from Bree, on the road to your new home in Bywater. Everything takes place in Bywater and other than Gandalf and Rosie Cotton, who sometimes mentions Gaffer Gamgee’s son ‘Sam’ – you don’t really get to enjoy the characters from Tolkien’s world. Yes, there are Hobbits and even a Dwarf and yes, the world is based on the books, but if I’m honest, that’s kind of where the references end.
I understand that this game wasn’t meant to be about the book characters, but I would have loved for this game to have taken place in Hobbiton. My best guess as to why they went with Bywater is that a lot of the game is about making Bywater a Shire-approved village, which Hobbiton undoubtedly already is.
Nevertheless, you do get your standard comfort of a sandy Hobbit-hole in the ground.
Upon loading into the game, I was charmed by the graphics. I’ve seen a ton of misery about people complaining about the graphics and I don’t get it. The colors, designs, and surroundings are all so charming and may be one of the best things about the game.
What I found underwhelming was the character choices and the clothes. There wasn’t much individuality that could be placed into the characters you made and when it came to buying more outfits, there were only a finite number of clothes to purchase.
A Hobbit doesn’t need individuality – only seven square meals a day.
The options felt rigid and less creative. Personally, I’ll never understand the games that have various hair and clothes options for the NPCs that you can’t hope to obtain for your own character. I just wanted more, but I suppose the aim was for the Hobbits to be as earthy-toned as possible. I understand that from a faithful-to-the-source-material kind of way, but from a gaming perspective, it leaves much to be desired.
As for designing your Hobbit-hole, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the options you could customize. I adored picking the different structures and colors for the home, but I was perplexed that you couldn’t change how the pantry or kitchen looked. All in all, it was more triumphant than not.
Getting into the gameplay is where things start to loosen at the seams. While the game is aesthetically gorgeous, there are some design choices that keep this game from truly thriving. So, let’s kind of talk about what you can expect from the game and then I’ll go into where the pitfalls are.
In Tales of the Shire, your whole deal is that you’re a new Hobbit in town, taking over a Hobbit home from a now-passed Hobbit, Old Ruby. It’s your job to insert yourself into the daily life of Bywater, assimilate, and thrive by helping the community with their day-to-day tasks.
Bywater is a bit of winding area that takes some time to get the hang of, but with the guiding system of sparrows, you can generally get where you need to go, whether that’s delivering something to a particular Hobbit or going out in search of food to forage. The map will show you where it all is and, where the food is concerned, it will change seasonally.
Tales of the Shire is all about fetch quests. If you’re not a fan of these types of games, then save your money. Nearly every morning, you’ll have requests in your mailbox from villagers wanting you to come see them to help with things or have something that needs attention in the mainline quests.
No admittance except on party business
Additionally, you’ll be expected to play host on a constant basis. This means that you need to be cooking and inviting Hobbits over for meals or else they’ll get grumpy with you. In order to expand your recipes, you have to have successful meals because those are generally the reward for serving a Hobbit at your table.
From there, you either need to forage for ingredients or set up your garden because you can’t buy vegetables and fruits from a stall. You’re only able to buy animal byproducts and grains. Everything else must be found or grown.
This isn’t an issue so much as time-intensive. There are no fast-travel options, so you must walk everywhere. At first, this was a charming aspect that made perfect sense to the life of a Hobbit. But, you get tired of this real fast when you traipse across the map only to realize you forgot something or have a full inventory and have to wander there and back again because of it.
Foraging will take far longer than you expect it to and that is only made worse by the clubs. Initially, the Hobbits believe that they must have clubs in order to be considered a village, so you’re tasked with starting four clubs: cooking, foraging, fishing, and gardening.
While you don’t run these clubs, you are a member of all four of them. These clubs all have daily quests that you can do, like foraging for eight of an item, cooking three dishes with onions, catching four of a particular type of fish, or growing/harvesting a random number of produce.
By adding these tasks in, you’re now juggling even more fetch quests and they’re fairly important to juggle because they are how you upgrade things. If you want a better kitchen, more garden space, and a bigger backpack, then you have to do these quests in order to upgrade those things.
Only a fool of a Took cares for the goings on outside of home.
You may notice that I didn’t mention a fourth upgrade and that’s because I simply don’t know it. It pertains to fishing and fishing is the most unpleasant thing to do in the whole game. If you play with a controller, it will vibrate and there are no settings to alter the intensity or turn it off. From the time the fish bites til you pull it up, it vibrates constantly.
I’ve had a fish on the line for 15 seconds because the fish pulled and I was trying not to break the line by keeping constant tension on it. 15 seconds of constant vibration for one fish and I needed more fish. For me, it’s a matter of disliking the sensation, but this could easily impact someone negatively who has a medical condition, meaning that they can’t do the fishing portions of the game.
And that’s it. You cook to keep Hobbits happy, you help them with their tasks, and you complete tasks in your clubs. Along the way, you’ll get some story, but things are very on the rails. You can’t even talk to the named NPCs outside of needing something from them. They have no dialogue options.
I mentioned some of the bad earlier, but let’s just rip off the band-aid. The NPCs are kind of lifeless, the forced vibration isn’t great, and there is no fast-travel… what else is there? Well, the guided system of sparrows that I mentioned? They aren’t a constant. The guiding system is made up of a few different sparrows that will fly in, land on something, and then fly off, only for another one to land farther off.
You’d think it would work well, except the birds fly off when you get close, so it can make it hard to know where they were pointing and it’s kind of distracting to constantly be looking for the next bird rather than what is in front of you. You eventually get the hang of the map and don’t need the sparrows as much, but I don’t know why there wasn’t just one bird that showed the way. And, they’ll take you down paths that are blocked off to you, meaning you’ll have to try to go around the back way to get where you need to.
Fly, you fools!
As for the task list, it’s woefully unhelpful. I’m going to use one of my own problems as an example. There’s a quest called the ‘Taste of Bywater’ where you must come up with an official dish to represent the town. You have to make four helpings of it and serve it to four specific hobbits. The only problem is that your house isn’t big enough, so you must have the gathering at a different venue.
In this case, it was supposed to be held at the Three-Farthing Stone. In order to plan parties, you have to send out invitations at your writing desk and the Three-Farthing Stone wasn’t coming up as an option. I tried setting up the gathering at the writing desk, I went to the stone, and I even tried to talk to people individually.
My task list simply told me to hold the gathering and when I engaged the sparrow guiding system, it kept pointing me home. What I didn’t know is that there are sparkles outside of the Three-Farthing Stone that I had to inspect first in order to add it to my venue options.
There was nothing that pointed me in the right direction and it would have been so easy to simply add a line to inspect the stone or to have the sparrows point you to the stone. I was so lost that I ended up contacting support for it.
I’ll fully admit that I ignored the sparkles and I have some blame in this. However, I wouldn’t have needed to contact support if there had been a bit more care in the guiding system and the task list. This wasn’t even the first time I found a quest worded a little too vaguely, it’s just the one that I tripped on.
Watch the trailer for Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game
Oh, and be sure you have the food in your inventory or you’ll be walking what feels like the distance to Mordor: there, back, and there again. When you hold parties at your home, you can pull dishes from your pantry. However, at other venues, they need to be in your inventory and, while that seems obvious, I was still able to access the pantry the same as I could at home; it just didn’t populate the prepared food outside of the Hobbit-hole.
Overall, I feel like Tales of the Shire has promise. I didn’t find it a hardship to play, but there was nothing keeping me enthralled either. It’s one of those games that, if you love the idea of Hobbits and you enjoy fetch quests, you’ll likely enjoy this game. However, if you’re looking for something more engaging and with more references, Gandalf wouldn’t give this a pass.
It’s not the best and it’s not the worst – it’s just meh. Honestly, it didn’t feel like Tolkien had a lot of influence here beyond the setting.
If you’d like to try out Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game, you can get it on Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch for $34.99. Be sure that you want this game before you purchase it.
While you’re here, feel free to check out some of my other reviews like Spray Paint Simulator or Tiny Aquarium: Social Fishkeeping.
