Tales Of The Shire still has a long way to go if it wants to be valuable

The first time I saw Lord of the Rings, I wanted nothing more than to be a beautiful, willowy, effortlessly cool elf married, as almost every eight-year-old girl wishes, to Orlando Bloom’s Legolas. In my late teens, I was content to remain human as long as I could swoon over Aragon. But now, at the wise age of almost 31, I know the truth: the greatest creature you could ever hope to be in Middle-earth is a hobbit. Thankfully, Tales of the Shire lets you do just that.

Wētā Workshop’s Tales of the Shire is a cozy life simulation game centered around Tolkien’s most sociable creatures, hobbits. Given the high demand for wholesome titles and the enduring love of the Lord of the Rings series, I’ve always felt that it was only a matter of time before a game would emerge that celebrated these cheerful and endlessly hungry creatures. After all, what else do hobbits do but tend their lands, drink, dance, be merry, and occasionally embark on an epic quest to save the world? I recently had the chance to do almost all of these things while playing through a two-hour preview build of Tales of the Shire, but unfortunately I didn’t walk away feeling as satisfied as a Gamgee cozying up in his hobbit hole. While Tales of the Shire is charming and has some solid foundations, Wētā Workshop is going to have to embark on a journey filled with quality of life improvements and some major overhauls if they really want to make this game special.

The preview follows your created character as he leaves his hometown of Bree to start a life of his own in one of The Shire’s most picturesque villages, Bywater. When you arrive, your first set of quests will task you with proving that Bywater is indeed is a village, as a local grouch suggests the village is more “backward” than Bywater.

This storyline serves as a tutorial of sorts for the game, as it introduces you to some of your neighbors and the core gameplay mechanics of fishing, cooking, gardening, foraging, and relationship building. Many of these features really worked for me. The game’s fishing mechanic, while not new, is a fun, tension-based minigame that isn’t annoying or debilitating. While I’m not someone who particularly enjoys cooking or crafting in the game—I generally do these things out of necessity—I found myself actually wanting to spend a significant amount of time in my kitchen. Instead of just pressing a few buttons to make a meal, you’re encouraged to chop and cook your ingredients to create a more textured dish.

This ties in with gardening and foraging, as high-quality ingredients, spices, and herbs enhance the overall flavor of the meal. I loved mindlessly wandering through the forest, gathering hops, bulbous mushrooms, and currants. Another system I really enjoyed in Tales of the Shire is Companion Crops, which grant certain crops bonuses if grown alongside a crop they’re compatible with. Conversely, there are some crops that need to be kept in separate beds, or they’ll deteriorate. After harvesting, gathering, and fishing ingredients, it was easy to throw them all into my massive pantry, which you can seamlessly pull from while cooking. In short, the more “freewheeling” elements of Tales of the Shire work beautifully together.

The “maintaining relationships” aspect, however, is a different story. While one of the ways to improve your relationships—inviting your neighbors over for a meal that will satisfy their cravings—is fun, that’s unfortunately about as much as I found fun. While I generally liked the game’s writing style, I felt the same way about many of the villagers in the village, each with the same cheeky jokes and, more annoyingly, frustrating fetch quests. I spent so much time in the village going back and forth between a few select hobbits, with one particularly egregious quest having me go back and forth between the same two hobbits more than four times.

And while the overall environment is beautiful and reminiscent of The Shire we know and love – picturesque, comforting and green – I found myself constantly annoyed by the game’s quirks. Bywater is full of hobbits, a clear attempt to make the town feel lived in, which I completely understand. But it quickly became frustrating as I tried to walk around and meet my neighbors and almost each hobbit I ran into was an NPC I couldn’t interact with. Despite it being full of people, it started to feel a little sparse.

Rather than providing a traditional mini-map, compass, or other form of “breadcrumb trail” to follow, Tales of the Shire opts to immerse players by having them track blue birds that occasionally perch on fence posts and signs. While cute in theory, it often became a little frustrating when I was outpacing the birds, or when I was moving through a denser area like the town square or the forest and simply lost them. Given that Bywater is so deeply embedded in nature and is filled with small bridges, winding roads, and only a few handfuls of interactable NPCs scattered around the map, it was frustrating not being able to fully rely on the birds. While the game clearly didn’t want you to constantly pull out your map and lose that sense of whimsical adventure, I felt like I had to. And these are just a few of my gripes.

Between the fetch quests, my growing frustrations with certain features, and the lack of compelling characters or plot points, I eventually found myself not really interested in leaving my little hobbit hole. Unlike a game like Stardew Valley, where it’s feasible to retreat freely and focus on creating your own little slice of paradise, Tales of the Shire seems to rely heavily on you interacting with your neighbors. Partly because you’d be hard-pressed to fill your entire day doing any of the actually fun stuff, even if you did decide to spend some of it giving your house a nice little makeover.

This then relegates you to doing not-quite-uninteresting quests for not-so-interesting neighbors. It’s also worth noting that, at least in the preview, there was no calendar full of birthdays, festivals, or other events. This gave me pause, because without something to break up the mundane aspects of the game, I’m not sure I’d be compelled to keep playing. Ultimately, that’s the biggest problem with Tales of the Shire right now: even a life sim-sick person like me (don’t ask how many hours I’ve sunk into Moonstone Island and Fields of Mistria this year) isn’t going to be drawn into this game. While it has some great features, beautiful music, an art style that, while a little clunky, fits, and adds a lot of charm, And an incredible IP behind it, the whole package that is offered doesn’t quite work. Thankfully the game has been delayed until after 2024 and will instead be released in early 2025, hopefully giving the team some time to polish the game into something Gollum would crave.