Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings™ Game is a life simulator game, similar toDisney Dreamlight ValleyorAnimal Crossing.
In it, you take control of a fully customisable Hobbit, who has decided to move to the quaint ‘almost village’ of Bywater after spending many years at The Prancing Pony in Bree.
Now, if you’re a LOTR fan, you might have noticed two points of note in that last sentence. Firstly, your Hobbit stayed in The Prancing Pony for many years, which is actually an inn, so youshouldhave a lot more money than you do to afford day-rates.
Secondly, Bywater is an ‘almost village’. This is where your tale begins, finding the inhabitants of Bywater and nearby Hobbiton squabbling over whether Bywater is indeed an independent village or part of Hobbiton itself.
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It’s Mortal Engines minus the city-eating part.
To help the Hobbits figure it out, you will need to consult an ancient ‘Book of Rules’ and fulfill its requirements. These range from making a signature Bywater dish to putting a wolf’s head on the outside gate.
Thankfully, this being acozy game, you’re not required to go out hunting, but rather that quest involves a lot of back and forth between villagers. This becomes a theme for the rest of your time in Bywater.
Could You Just Do This Quick Errand For Me?
You see, as the newest member of the not-quite-village, the inhabitants realise quite quickly that they can get you to do even the most mundane of chores, if they phrase it as ‘getting to know the neighborhood’.
You’ll be sent out to find missing cows, carry messages and, of course, create delicious meals to share with everyone in Bywater.
Cooking meals, alongside fishing, foraging, and growing fruit and veg, form the four main activities you’ll be participating in during your time in Tales of the Shire. Let’s dig into them a bit.
The Best Way To A Hobbit’s Heart Is Through Its Stomach
To cook your meals, you’ll be given recipes by the various townsfolk and then asked to choose the ingredients, which each have a different taste profile. Each recipe will have a specific texture profile too which, if you hit it, gives the meal a bonus.
What you’ll find at the beginning of the game, however, is that you often can’t physically hit the texture profile asked for as you don’t have the equipment to get, for example, a crispy texture.
This gives a nice goal for you, as you may see what you need, you just need to figure out how to get it, which mostly involves seeing which of the villagers’ gifts give you a new cooking apparatus.
Thankfully, the game is very forgiving, so if you don’t hit the bonuses, you may still level up your Fellowship with the various villagers quite quickly – there are no microtransactions in this game, which is a great choice, as it could have easily been a free-to-play game.
Cooking meals, alongside fishing, foraging and growing fruit and veg, form the four main activities you’ll be participating in.
The food itself is very well presented, and is where the most detail has been provided. Over 100 different recipes are able to be collected, with lovely presentation and some great bits of humour in some of the recipe names like ‘Old Noakes’ Stew! Rest are RUBBISH'.
Funny Fishing…
This humour extends to most of the game, with the writing being a highlight throughout my playthrough.
I found myself regularly chuckling along to the Hobbit’s sense of humour, only to be jolted to attention when one of them decides to go a bit more introspective. Overall, the characters' personalities, while quite stereotypical, shine through quickly.
My favourite character is probably Old Noakes, the Fisher-Hobbit, who names all the fish in Bywater, including the ‘Dunno’ fish – as he doesn’t know what to call it…
Fishing is where I spent most of my time, with the game having a spin onStardew Valley’sfishing system of trying to reel in the fish, while making sure to not over reel and lose the fish.
While it’s not nearly as challenging (or rewarding) as Stardew, you do get the relaxing feeling that comes with the best fishing games.
One point to note is that, while each fish technically has the best time of day and season in which to fish for it, they also show up at any point and time, so don’t worry if you feel like you’ve missed your chance.
Fishing is also the best way to get money, with each fish giving a good amount of coins from any shopkeeper. But be warned: you’re able to’t buy food back when you sell it, so be careful.
…And Forgiving
This forgiving nature continues throughout the game, with everything being geared towards the casual audience.
The game doesn’t punish you for missing a shared meal outside of the villagers sometimes getting annoyed and not wanting to be invited for a day.
There’s also no stamina, so you’re able to fish and garden to your heart’s content, with space for gardening and fish in the ponds being the only barriers.
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A frustration for me arrives with the amount of water in the game, compared to the amount of fish, with fish only appearing in small areas related to unlocking jetties, while the rivers and other springs don’t have any fish to speak of.
There’s also a lovely little addition to the game whereby, if you try and exit, it will tell you when you last saved so you don’t forget. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t have autosave, which would be just about bearable if I didn’t keep encountering crashes.
Crashes Galore
Originally, I was going to mention all the different crashes, of which I had at least 3, could be replicated easily. However, when I popped into the game on the 24th of July, there had been an update which fixed these, so I’m hoping by the full release the game will be much more stable.
Still, it’s frustrating when a game which, while looking pretty, doesn’t seem to be that intensive or complicated, has this many bugs, from crashes to slowdown to blurry backgrounds.
…with everything being geared towards the casual audience.
One particularly infuriating bug happened while I was using my Steam Deck, whereby it would stop scrolling down the inventory in the pantry granularly, and instead just jump down to the second section after I had scrolled so far.
This made it very awkward to take out some of the food, especially as when I then used the D-Pad to increase the amount I wanted to take out of the inventory, it would also move my cursor over to another item, sometimes making me pick out the wrong item.
If this happens to you, I’d suggest moving over to a different tab in the pantry, as if all the items are above the fold. Then, it seems to work correctly.
Reactive Writing Is Difficult
Other issues include the writing not reflecting the world’s circumstances. For example, Old Noakes asks you to find his trousers while he’s wearing them. Not to say I want to see the old Hobbit’s undergarments, but you’ve got to keep it consistent at the very least.
Alas, this particular quest also caused a soft lock for me, whereby the game doesn’t allow you to stray far from the location where Noakes' trousersshouldbe, but they’re not there, which caused me to perpetually be stuck in this area.
All the different crashes, of which I had at least 3, could be replicated easily.
I’m hoping there will be an update for this bug again before launch, but at present, I can’t continue the game further.
You’ll also have points with the writing where the characters seem not to realise they’ve been talking to you for an entire season. Fosco, for example, will ask you to make him some food after gaining friendship with him… by making him food.
There’s also an issue, as withmost life sims, whereby some of the writing starts to repeat very quickly. This is most apparent in the letters the Hobbits send out to ask for certain tastes or to thank you for your hospitality. Each one has only the one option, so you’ll quickly find you’ve memorised it.
While overall, I would say the writing is of a good standard, bits like these make me think the game should have spent a bit more time in the frying pan before going into the fire of release.
It’s the same for the music – while it’s initially comforting, it very quickly gets repetitive, and I found itbest to play with no sound, and instead put on an audiobook after a while.
Foraging With The Birds And The Butterflies
Now, don’t worry commenters, I haven’t forgotten about the two other sections of the game – foraging and gardening.
Holding the RT button on a controller makes you skip along the ground!
Foraging is what you’ll be doing when you’re waiting for the story to progress, which will happen quite a lot as it normally requires a day to pass, but you can’t sleep, or progress until nighttime.
It involves following butterflies around the landscape until you find something you can pick up, be it wood, mushrooms, berries, or herbs. These butterflies are an awesome touch, as they allow the game to gently push you in the right direction without having flashing borders or magical MacGuffins.
Personally, I found some of the early game in particular quite difficult to feel motivated by.
Alongside the butterflies, there are also birds, which are used to direct you across the map like a natural GPS. Just press somewhere on the map and the birds will perch on signposts or fences, pointing you to where you need to go.
Again, it’s just a brilliant way to use the environment to help the player out without it feeling obtrusive. More of this please, other games!
Gardening Time
The final section of the gameinvolves gardening, whereby you can place as many seeds in different gardening beds as you can fit.
Some seeds will be more compatible with others, so you’ll want to mix these together. Just like with cooking, these are shown by three different masks – happy, sad, and neutral.
Place the correct food or seeds in front of something, and it will show a happy mask, and that will confer bonuses.
Craving A Specific Taste And Some Motivation
This is all a nice little puzzle, especially as for cooking, you can have ‘meal cravings’ and ‘taste cravings’, which allow you to mix and match what you have in your pantry with what the Hobbits want – you only need to fulfill one of the cravings to get the bonus.
And so, the game mostly revolves around you doing one of these four tasks while also fulfilling a multitude of fetch quests for the villagers as well as some light-choice-based dialogue options.
Personally, I found some of the early game in particular quite difficult to feel motivated by, as most of the progression happens in the morning with your daily letters and the shared meal, which you can get out of the way in the morning, as there’s no bonus to changing up when you eat.
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After this, you’re just left waiting around until night comes, and you can skip to the next day. This becomes less of a hassle when you unlock clubs, as they push you to explore more of the world to gain points to get rewards.
But, as this isn’t unlocked until around the 8-hour mark, there’s quite a bit of pushing to play the game before you get there.
I would have liked further options to increase your relationships with your fellow Hobbits outside the shared meal function, be it talking to them, finishing their Tales, or even getting invited by them to a shared meal and having to do a basic dialogue-choice-based mini-game to gain their approval.
I might have preferred a real-life timer, similar to Animal Crossing, as that at least forces you to embrace the cozy nature of the game and just exist in it, rather than pushing to move the story on.
Customisation Is The Name Of The Game
There is quite anextensive customisation modein the game, if that’s your cup of tea. you may add a variety of furniture and decorations to your Hobbit hole, as well as edit the walls, ground, ceilings etc. with a variety of designs.
It can all be done quite granularly as well which is nice, with a great system of placing and rotating items, which reminded me ofSkyrim, but without the need to fiddle around with first-person mode.
If you really can’t be bothered to go to the postbox in the morning, you may read your letters straight from the archive in the writing desk.
you’re able to also edit your character’s clothes, appearance, and even name at any time, which I appreciated, as it allows you to roleplay to your heart’s content – even if it means the other characters don’t really acknowledge you, past saying a generic nickname like ‘Hobbit’ or ‘Love’ or your full name.
I would have loved it if, after wearing certain clothing, or placing different decorations down in the house, different characters would warm to you more or make comments about the fact that you’re using their gifts, just to give you more motivation to showcase your Hobbit hole.
Still, I appreciate for some the customisation is the purpose of the game itself, so to them I say you’ll have a great time, as there doesn’t even seem to be a limit for the number of pots and pans you can have out at once,andit doesn’t progress your day to customise!
Graphics And Computing Power
Finally, the world itself is lovely, with a nicewatercolour-esque graphic styleand big, bold colours. I did experience some slowdown on both my Steam Deck and on my PC, so I’d tinker with the graphics settings, even if you’re running what you think is a good setup to reduce frame skips and slowdown – the recommended specs are a 3060 Ti and AMD Ryzen 5 8400F processor.
Personally, I think this is a bit too high for a game of this scale, and, as with quite a lot of my gripes with the game, I hope they can be brought under control in an update.
Overall, I’d say that’s where my mind is with the game at the moment: it feels like an early access title which would benefit from bug checks and player feedback.
The game works with Steam Deck with Steam Cloud saves, but some of the menus work better with a mouse and keyboard.
Closing Comments:
My time with Tales of the Shire has been a frustrating mix of small dopamine hits when progressing each morning, to dragging myself to the finish line of a day after exhausting everything I need to do. The constant crashes and lack of an autosave have put me in quite an anxious state for a cozy game, as I make sure to save before doing anything. While I feel the game has made its way ‘there’, it’s not quite ‘back again’ and needs a bit more time before it’s really ready for an adventure.
Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game
Reviewed on PC
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