Tales Of The Shire: A Lord Of The Rings Game

Platforms: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch

From the same Wētā Workshop as the Lord Of The Rings films, Tales Of The Shire swaps Tolkien’s epic conflicts for a cosy life sim in bucolic Bywater, set between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings proper. If you're a hardcore Tolkien aficionado, you probably just bristled with grim foreknowledge, as that's the same Bywater of the infamous ‘Scouring of the Shire’, doomed to be overrun and utterly despoiled by Saruman. That puts quite the damper on your genteel efforts to grow organic produce and host dinners with your neighbours.

Or it would, if that factored into Tales Of The Shire at all. Instead, as a custom Hobbit – designed to your tastes in a passable-if-uninspiring character creator – you're newly transplanted from Bree to Bywater, with little greater ambition than making friends with the locals. Bywater's biggest ruction on your arrival is a disagreement on whether or not it counts as a town or a village.

Structurally, most of what's on offer here feels like a lot like a Story Of Seasons game, dressed up in Tolkien drag. No sooner have you entered Bywater than you’re palling around, helping out the likes of Orlo the postman or the herbalist Delphi, and getting to work growing crops, catching fish, and generally sprucing the place up. You inherit your own Hobbit hole, which you'll be able to revamp to increasingly exacting standards, but at the start you can't even get in the front door – an early sign of problems to come, as upgrades come far too slowly.

Feels like a slog.

A lot of Tales Of The Shire feels like a slog. Wētā has tried to make the mechanics typical to the life sim genre a bit more involved – there's greater depth to planting crops, for instance, with bonuses to pairing seeds that complement each other – but it too often comes out as overcomplicated. Then there are moments where it feels like the developers abandoned ideas halfway through – such as having rolling seasons, but no real penalty if you don't plan your gardens in line with changing weather. A fishing mini-game is also rote (pull in the opposite direction to the fish! Don't snap your line!), while gathering mushrooms, nuts, and other ingredients as you explore rapidly gets annoying due to an initially tiny carrying capacity.

One particularly nice aspect is how the game leans into the eponymous tales. Rather than a checklist of objectives, each task is framed as a small chapter of a life unfolding. Whether it's introductions to the townfolk, or reasons to explore the surrounding areas, the more of these little side stories you complete, the more embedded you feel in Bywater's community. There's a real charm to building relationships with your neighbours. Cooking, too, is a fun system, allowing you to prepare, combine, and cook ingredients in a way that almost feels transplantable to real life. It's good that cooking is one of the better implemented systems here too, as you'll be doing a lot of it, especially when you invite the locals over for friendship-boosting meals together.

On balance, that might all make for a middling cosy game, one that probably wouldn't win over Stardew Valley fans but might be entertaining enough for Lord Of The Rings obsessives keen to spend some time with the Brandybucks. Unfortunately, Tales Of The Shire feels borderline unfinished. Not only is there no spoken dialogue, there's not even the sort of placeholder audio games use to mimic speech, meaning all your interactions feel flat. Of course, that's when you can even interact with villagers at all – most of the time, unless a Tale directly leads you to another character, you can't speak with them as you're exploring. A gestures tool, allowing you to wave or express emotion, feels especially pointless.

Then there are the countless bugs, including getting stuck in objects, necessary items failing to spawn, and total progress blocks forcing a restart of the entire game. There's also frequent slowdown and object pop-in when simply wandering around Bywater. It's hard to comprehend how a game with this sort of aesthetic, all cartoonish character designs, unchallenging textures, and watercolour palettes, can end up looking and performing so poorly.

It Wētā had perhaps played into fans' knowledge of what awaits Bywater, it could have at least given Tales Of The Shire some more emotional depth. As it stands, this is an overly twee village life, filled with repetitive tasks and lacking necessary polish. Bring on the Scouring.