Tales of the Shire falls short of the LOTR Animal Crossing promise

On paper, a cozy little game set in the Shire sounds like a slam dunk. The Shire is canonically a beautiful, peaceful, inviting little place, and a game that lets you customize your own personal Hobbit hole sounds delightful. But in practice, Weta Workshop’s new life sim, Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of The Rings Game, sadly falls as short of its quest as Boromir.

Published by Private Division and out July 29 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, Tales of the Shire allows players to step into the hairy feet of a Hobbit who has recently moved from Bree to a smaller settlement in the Shire called Bywater. Your ultimate goal is to complete quests (called Tales) by befriending Bywater’s locals and improving the area until it officially qualifies as a village by Hobbit standards.

The game includes your standard cozy life-sim genre staples: NPCs to cultivate relationships with, a home to decorate, outfits to wear, and recipes to cook using ingredients that have been foraged in the wild, grown in the player’s garden, or caught from Bywater’s various lakes and streams. Players start out by creating their Hobbit, but the game’s character creator doesn’t allow for too much customization. It does feature a fairly wide range of skin tones, but other than that, it’s not much to write home about. 

Hobbits have always been depicted as strange-yet-charming little creatures, but in Tales of the Shire, they’re downright creepy looking, as if someone took a handful of troll dolls from the ’80s and plopped them down in Middle Earth. The game’s environments, too, are visually lacking, and I spent my time with the game feeling as though I were wandering around in Old School Runescape, not the Shire.

The gameplay loop is about as shallow as Bywater’s ponds. Players can befriend Bywater’s residents by inviting them over for shared meals, using grown and foraged ingredients to cook their preferred dishes. But in addition to being rather unfortunate-looking, the locals are pretty boring, too. Players will meet Gandalf early on, but he doesn’t stick around for long. References to Bilbo Baggins and other well-known characters from The Lord of The Rings novels are made, but for the most part, players are stuck interacting with a cast of unmemorable nobodies.

The objectives that don’t require cooking meals are usually multi-step fetch quests that go on forever. Tales of the Shire does attempt to inject a bit of humor into things now and then, but it tends to fall flat. Reading a story about a Hobbit who’s trying to get something done but keeps getting sent back and forth between the same two residents might be amusing, but actually experiencing it is incredibly frustrating. 

Tales of the Shire fails to leave any room for players to go off-script, even by an inch. For instance, while making my way to an NPC’s home to speak to her about foraging, I noticed some plants became highlighted when I got near them. So naturally, I picked them up. Once I got to the NPC in question, my character asked her for a foraging tutorial. Seemingly noticing that I’d already foraged some ingredients, she asked where I’d gotten them. The only dialogue option I was allowed to reply with was “The shop,” even though it wasn’t true. 

Foraging would once again give me trouble when the same NPC invited me to go foraging with her and a group of other residents. I met the group, spoke to the NPC to start the quest, and followed the group as they walked through the forest, picking up ingredients along the way. Eventually, the group came to a stop, and I was instructed to forage three ingredients. The ones I’d already picked up didn’t count, and even worse, the area we’d stopped in was now completely blocked off — there was no escaping until I managed to forage three ingredients, but since I’d picked the area nearly clean already, I had to spend extra time frantically searching. Eventually, I found some tiny mushrooms I hadn’t noticed initially, but if I had found them earlier, I likely would have had to restart the entire quest.

A lack of clear instruction was a common theme throughout my playthrough. One quest directed me to equip my watering can, but failed to tell me how to equip it, or where it could be refilled. The fishing minigame’s initial tutorial thankfully did tell me which buttons to press. I’m glad I paid attention, because when I looked through the game’s help section later on, the fishing game’s instructions relayed the general gist, but failed to tell me which buttons to press to perform these actions. Hitting random buttons in an attempt to figure things out became a regular occurrence, as the game’s help section seems content to tell you what to do without actually showing you how to do it.

Farming and fishing both lack depth — sure, there are different fish to catch and crops to grow each season, but there are plenty of games out there that provide far more variety and excitement. There are no tool upgrades to work towards, and no wild weather events that will impact your farming activities (aside from the occasional rainy day that will water your plants for you). Given the fact that the game’s characters are not cute, interesting, or romanceable, it’s hard to work up the desire to interact with them.

Decorating is where Tales of the Shire finally starts to shine. Players can choose different wall, flooring, and ceiling designs for each room in their home, and decor objects (which can be purchased from shops or received as gifts from residents) can be placed almost anywhere — on tables, windowsills, and anything else with a flat surface. Objects can also be freely rotated, and aren’t automatically snapped into a grid layout a la Animal Crossing or The Sims 4. But the downside is that Tales of the Shire doesn’t include nearly as many decor objects as most life-sims (nor does it feature multiple color options for decor items), so I didn’t have much of a reason to make use of its excellent object-placement system.

Overall, the game feels unpolished, and left me wondering who exactly its intended audience is. Lord of The Rings fans will likely be disappointed by the game’s flat dialogue and snooze-worthy storyline. Fans of farming sims and life sims will likely be disappointed by the lack of variety, depth, and customization options.

The Shire is known to be a warm, inviting, beautiful place that’s teeming with life. With its drab environments, one-dimensional characters, and repetitive gameplay, Tales of the Shire never quite manages to capture that Tolkien-esque whimsy. The game promises a Stardew Valley-like experience set in the rich The Lord of The Rings universe, but ultimately, it fails to deliver on both fronts.