A Cosy Life in the Shire: Tales of the Shire Delayed to March 2025
For someone like me who is desperate to get stuck into any whimsical life sim, Tales of the Shire sounds like a perfect match. On paper, it promises a cosy life in Middle-earth, filled with farming, decorating, cooking, and fishing. But the demo exhibits a desperate attempt to make a cosy game while the subgenre is so popular rather than focusing on building a game that welcomes new Lord of the Rings fans while letting long-time ones live out the dream of living as a hobbit. As a result you're currently met with something that lacks an identity and is frankly just disappointing.
To start, a lot of it is boring. There's no better way to put it. And that's coming from someone who has put thousands of hours into plenty of life and farming simulators which revolve around a very simple task. Farming feels pretty pointless, aside from getting ingredients to cook, and there's a lot you can cook without having to farm, which quickly stripped my willingness to do it in the first place. In the demo, you're limited to only having five planters as well, rather than being able to customise and streamline your own farming space.
A Foraging Delight
On the other hand, you have the option to go out and forage for ingredients, which I quickly opted for once I realised farming was giving me the same satisfaction as stubbing my toe. Foraging is one of the most detailed and engaging parts of Tales of the Shire, which came as a huge surprise given that it's hardly spoken about by any NPCs in the few hours I spent in the demo. Rather than things like mushrooms being labelled with umbrella terms like "red toadstool" or even better—just mushroom—they are modelled and named after real-life edible mushrooms. I found a lot of joy in picking Puffballs and Chanterelles, or plucking Wild Beef off tree trunks and scurrying home like an excited raccoon to store my findings in the pantry before I had to gingerly pluck them out to cook with.
A Clicking Adventure
When it comes to cooking, a little more effort has been put in compared to farming. I mean, with the amount hobbits eat and talk about food, you'd expect the passion to shine through in the activity of preparing meals. But, even though it feels like cooking has more substance, it's really just a lot of clicking and hoping for the best. You chop ingredients like vegetables to be either chunky or smooth depending on what you're cooking, and have the option to fry them to alter the texture too. If you match the texture to what a small grid in the right hand corner suggests, your meal will be better quality and improve your friendship with whoever you invite over for dinner. It's a total guessing game, but it's more entertaining than watching taters grow in planters.
Questlines for Information
As for the story missions, a lot of the quests I was told to complete involved me going from one character to another to ask them about something, and then being told to go and find someone else to talk to. It felt like a never-ending chase for information with no real reward, and I ended up just being more frustrated at the game when I was prompted to move onto the next victim. But, I have to give Tales of the Shire the benefit of the doubt here as the demo only offers the first few hours of the game, and I understand that this was an easy way to make me familiar with the map and meet the other hobbits in the shire. But still, I can't help feeling like it could've been executed in a more entertaining way than "go and ask them about a book".
Eyeing Out the Shire
Plus, characters in Tales of the Shire are very simple and have no defining features to set them apart, which makes things tricky when you're trying to familiarise yourself with everyone, or you're asked to speak to someone specific. It's like the same character model has been copy and pasted throughout the entire map, and even the character you create has nothing special to set it apart from the rest. A level of similarity is expected, given we're all hobbits in the Shire, but the models feel so disappointingly lifeless. One of the only defining features of characters in the game is the addition of thick black eyelashes that make everyone appear like they've just started listening to My Chemical Romance and visited the drugstore for the cheapest eyeliner. Even Gandalf has fallen victim to this fashion trend, and I frankly think he'd be more of a smokey eye fan.
The Shire itself has more going for it thankfully. Even though it mirrors the same cutesy, chibi-esque style of the characters, locations like your home have a fair bit of detail. It does look like the kind of place I'd want to live in, with hobbit holes overflowing with flowers and vegetation, so it's fun to explore to start. The map manages to offer quite a bit to see such as a market, a tavern, and plenty of other hobbit holes, without feeling too overwhelming, and I liked that a trail of birds leads you to your destination rather than you having to aimlessly run or skip around hoping you end up in the right place.
A Long Road Ahead
After spending four hours in the demo of Tales of the Shire, I'm confident in saying that it currently feels like a clumsy, half-baked attempt to resolve the last few years of Lord of the Rings games. There's an extreme lack of substance to mechanics, characters, and even dialogue. So rather than being a turning point, it feels like another nail in the coffin. But now its release date has been pushed back to 2025, I find it hard to believe I'm the only person aware of its faults. I desperately want to remain hopeful that it will be the next game I accidentally pour hundreds of hours into, finding a new life for myself in one of the most whimsical worlds imaginable. For that to happen, though, a lot more work is going to need to be done between now and its launch next year.
Tales of the Shire is set to launch on March 25, 2025, on PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, Android, and iOS via Netflix Games. It was originally scheduled to launch in Fall 2024, but the developers have pushed back the release date to allow for more time to polish the game and ensure it lives up to the expectations of fans.
This delay is a good thing. Games are rarely perfect on launch, and it is a good thing that the developers at Weta Workshop and Private Division are taking the time to make sure that Tales of the Shire is a great game. It has the potential to be a really great game, with a lot to offer players who want to experience the Shire in a new way. But for that potential to be fully realized, the game needs a lot of polish and refinement, and the delay will allow the developers to do just that.
The Road to Hobbiton
The game’s first full trailer promised friendship mechanics, cooking, fishing, home decorating, farming, seasonal changes, and other standards of the life sim genre. The demo that was recently released covered Tales of the Shire’s first few day/night cycles, putting the player in the role of a newcomer hobbit in the village of Bywater, which lies a few days’ walk from both Hobbiton (home of Bilbo and Frodo) and the human town of Bree (where the Prancing Pony inn is).
The character creator features an unexpectedly forward-thinking five-point slider for gender as well as the utterly unique option of customizing your character’s foot hair. Players can type in their own custom name and surname, but they also have the option to pick from two extensive lists of names seemingly cribbed directly from Tolkien’s work.
Tales of the Shire shows a clear and immediate insight into the duality of Tolkien’s hobbits — they have a great capacity to be loyal, forthright, brave, and hardy, which is made all the more surprising by their more observable capacity to be petty, conservative, and frivolous. One of the first things you learn from Orlo Proudfoot, the hobbit who welcomes you to Bywater, is that while big folk work out their differences with swords and arrows, hobbits do it by inviting people over for home-cooked meals.
One of the first major plot goals in the game is to become accepted as a Bywater “local” by hosting enough brunches with your neighbors. The few in-game days I spent with the demo were enough to get tantalizingly close to achieving this goal, but not to attain it. The bulk of my time in the game was spent in pursuit of NPCs to talk to rather than gathering ingredients with intention, repairing/decorating my somewhat dilapidated home, or cooking. But on the other hand, my walks were punctuated by alertness: Keep an eye out for butterflies, because following them is how you find forageable meal ingredients. Check that pond for swirls on the water to stock up on fish. Watch for the blue birds with flared red tail feathers that serve as the game’s wayfinding system.
I did catch the odd visual bug here and there — hobbits sitting next to benches instead of on them, one odd young man scooting along on his seated legs instead of walking — but Wētā has six months to work out the kinks.
A Promise of Whimsy
With how expertly Wētā appears to understand the cozy hobbit life sim brief, I expect there’s lots more to discover here. The game is being developed by Wētā Workshop, the company that was responsible for the practical effects in the Peter Jackson film trilogy. The studio has a lot of experience in creating immersive and detailed worlds, and they are bringing that same level of detail and attention to Tales of the Shire.
As Gandalf once said of hobbits, “You can learn all that there is to know about their ways in a month, and yet after a hundred years they can still surprise you at a pinch.”
We Await The Return of The King
Tales of the Shire is a promising game that has the potential to be a truly special experience. The delay is a disappointment, but it is a necessary one. The developers need more time to make sure that the game is polished and ready for release. I, for one, will be eagerly awaiting its arrival in March 2025.
