TALES OF THE SHIRE

Minimalism is out, cottagecore is in

- Andrea Shearon

After a few minutes of opening cutscenes and questing during my time playing a demo of Tales of the Shire I asked Wētā Workshop if I could spend the rest of my Tales of the Shire demo time just... moving furniture around back at my hobbit hole. Thankfully I was met with enthusiastic approval. Apparently rearranging all day is a perfectly acceptable way to approach life in Bywater.

And that's how I spent a majority of it - obsessively picking up everything from one room and bringing it into another to make piles of decorative clutter. My closest in-universe relative is probably Smaug, though instead of gold, I'm sitting on a pile of colourful bottles, fraying pillows, and charity shop trinkets. Tales of the Shire is quite laid back; it's more akin to Animal Crossing than anything else, at least the way I played it. My biggest concern was, "Can I make it cluttered and cute?" And the answer was always yes.