Tales Of The Shire: A Lord Of The Rings Game

Making a game about being a hobbit — inviting friends over for meals, gardening and farming, wandering the woods in search of mushrooms — would seem a natural fit with the proliferation of slice-of-life farming games hanging on the coattails of Stardew Valley. And in some ways, it is. Tales Of The Shire is buoyant and brisk. It has just enough subsystems to tickle the mind, while mostly abstaining from the deep economic systems that have defined the genre of late. But given the game's rich source material, and developer Weta Workshop's hands-on experience with the Lord Of The Rings films, it's a shame it doesn't differentiate itself more from others of its ilk. Like a hobbit, it rarely leaves its comfort zone.

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Events here precede The Lord Of The Rings, taking place a few decades before Frodo’s fateful journey to Mount Doom. You'll encounter characters from Tolkien’s books, such as Gandalf and Rosie Cotton (the young hobbit who eventually marries Sam Gamgee), but for the most part this is a story of daily life in a forgotten corner of Middle-earth. You name and customise your own hobbit, who’s relocating from the town of Bree to the rural Bywater. As you're settling into your new home, Bywater discovers that it’s not officially ranked as a village in the hobbit census (it’s labelled merely a district of Hobbiton). The population enlists you to make it a village for real. So while you tend your garden, decorate your hobbit hole and fish in local ponds and rivers, you also complete favours for the rest of the village and scheme with them over shared meals.

Each of these systems feeds into the next. Fishing, foraging and farming help you craft better meals for your fellow hobbits. The better the meals you make, the faster you'll build relationships with them and the faster you'll unlock fishing spots, rooms for your home, or items to buy. However, you can only plan and cook one shared meal each day. You can only plant certain plants when they are in season. Even the ‘sprint’ button triggers a leisurely skip. In other words, there’s no rushing, even if you want to hurry. Life is simple. The seasons will roll around again.