Tales of the Shire review: A disappointing journey that lacks Tolkien's magic and cozy gameplay

The release of the Nintendo Switch 2 is behind us, but there's still no news about a new Animal Crossing, which is a fan favorite in cozy gaming and casual life simulation genres. Stardew Valley is also getting on in years, so for consolation and with an aura of novelty, Tales of the Shire arrives—a game that aspires to provide us with a completely stress-free, idyllic gameplay experience. What's more, it will take us straight to the picturesque Shire in the universe of The Lord of the Rings, but instead of worrying about visits from the Nazgul or Sharkey's shenanigans, it will allow us to focus on what Hobbits love the most - food!

I'm into this kind of stuff, I love Lord of the Rings, I probably spent around 700 hours on the latest Animal Crossing, so I had high hopes for Tales of the Shire, but... I was a bit disappointed. The game wasn't as stress-free as I hoped because of technical issues and optimization. It didn't hook me enough to say it's another game I'll spend hundreds of hours on. There are things in it that I liked, but there are also some that I really didn't like. After a while, it really started to bother me that there weren't as many things to do and discover there, and in the end, I didn't really feel like I was in Hobbiton.

Citizen Hobbit

Let's start with the good things, though. In the game, we get to create our own Hobbit, who, after some time in Bree, ends up in a place aspiring to be a village called Bywater. We're moving into a slightly run-down but functional house, and we need to somehow win the favor of the local community. Later, as a well-known and liked resident of Bywater, we need to help the community convince an important official to grant the village the status of a town. This little story keeps us entertained for quite a few hours.

We're not left on our own; we always have the main stories to complete, which are basically just regular quests here. So we have to bring something to someone, prepare a meal, find something in the field, collect some things, talk to someone, while learning the mechanics of the game and unlocking important stuff. The residents of Bywater are a big "W" for their strong personalities. In a flash, we remember who's who, where they live, who's friendly and helpful, and who's always negative. There's a bit of a lack of voiced dialogue here, which would probably add more character to the characters. On the other hand, the devs deserve credit for clearly outlining the Hobbits' personalities even without that.

"What about second breakfast?"

All the important folks we know love being invited to eat something, and that's where Tales of the Shire stands out with its cooking mechanics. It's not particularly skill-demanding, as it only requires clicking to simulate chopping, but we can decide how finely we chop the ingredients, what container to prepare them in, and what seasonings to use. So, for a given recipe, which by the way, there are plenty of and we keep unlocking new ones, it creates different flavors of the dish and different levels of deliciousness, which is important for special meals. Our guests have their own taste preferences, and the better we satisfy them, the more we will increase our familiarity with them and receive various gifts in return: new recipes, ingredients, sometimes even some furniture.

Some meals include fish, which you can catch. It's the only activity in the game that requires a bit of skill, and it's probably the most interesting fishing mechanic in this type of life simulator games, although still very simple and not frustrating. Besides, we can also collect forest fruits and mushrooms and grow our own vegetables in garden beds. We can sell anything you gather or make at the village market stalls and use the money to buy more ingredients, spices, clothes, and furniture.

Customizing our home is another great feature of Tales of Shire. There are plenty of different furniture options, and we can change the appearance of almost every element of our house, both inside and out. And each of them individually - without limiting to ready-made sets. We get to choose how the windows, facade, and structure of the house look, and we have the same freedom inside, being able to change the walls, ceiling, and floors in each room separately. In combination with the amount of furniture, this creates an infinitely large number of combinations, only that...

One style to rule them all

We are in the Shire during the time between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, in a Hobbit village. That really limits how things can look. In Animal Crossing, we could decorate rooms in the style of Ikea or 60s America, Provencal, Asian - the choice is ours. In Bywater, there is a Hobbit style and that's it. Despite the variety of furniture options, the differences between them are actually very small, which makes collecting more decorative elements less rewarding.

The game lacks a tutorial related to home decorating, although there are tutorials for other mechanics, and I personally discovered this feature by accident. And there's nothing like the Happy Home Academy from Animal Crossing, which would motivate us to arrange our den, reward us for effort, and notice changes. Hobbits love to comment on our cooking adventures, but they stay silent about the house, as if the developers completely forgot about that aspect of the game after adding a bunch of furniture.

I didn't quite feel that it was really the world from Tolkien's books. Although some well-known Hobbit family names keep popping up, there's Gandalf, references to Bree, the Prancing Pony Inn, and Smaug, but somehow I perceived all of this more as a generic village in a cartoonish style. Maybe it's because there are no familiar music themes from the movie trilogy, or maybe it's the weird, poorly written dialogues that are hard to read, or the graphics. It's just my personal feeling, but I couldn't really get into it as a return to Tolkien's universe.

I see summer and I want it painted white...

The mentioned graphic design is one of the main things that I don't like in Tales of the Shire. I'm not just talking about the style, because a cartoon stylized as watercolor paintings definitely has its charm, and some views of Bywater can be quite pleasing. Except for the characters, everyone seems to have really heavy eyeliner for some reason - when I was creating my Hobbit, I couldn't shake the feeling that no matter who I made, they all ended up looking like a caricature of an Instagram model.

The overall visual presentation is a letdown, mainly due to the execution, which could definitely be better and more detailed. It feels like there was no heart put into it, like everything was done hastily and with minimal effort. The tendency to take the easy way out is most noticeable with the arrival of winter in the game. We always have the same landscape, the same blooming flowers in the gardens, and beds full of ripe cabbage and other vegetables, only the dominant color of grass and leaves on the trees is replaced with white. It's a shame that they didn't come up with some really creative changes to the map for each season.

Don’t be so hasty…

Another issue that I didn't quite like was the pace of the narration. For the first 7-8 hours, we're constantly engaged in some kind of story, always busy with something, always talking to someone, and then suddenly we reach a kind of mini finale and the stories just cut off. Sometimes, things only pop up sporadically, but otherwise, we have complete freedom to gather gifts from the forest and our garden, and to invite guests over for feasts. It's best combined with the challenges of village clubs, because then we not only deepen relationships with the residents, but also increase the prestige of a given club. This, in turn, allows us to unlock more spots for gatherings, rooms in the house, and sections of the garden.

We supposedly have seasons here, but they aren't synchronized with the actual calendar. However, we can click through them to see what each season has to offer. I sped up the unlocking of my garden that way and I admit, it wasn't an interesting experience. You know, reviewing a game has its requirements, but I think even if I were just playing for myself, I would have gone down that path, because nothing was holding me back, and curiosity got the best of me. There definitely should have been more restrictions, like keeping some things secret until the end of the season, having special attractions only on certain days of the week or month, and planning the quests better. Considering that there are very few activities and the furniture all looks the same, I was losing motivation to keep playing with each passing hour.

It ruins my precious PC!

All the more so, as the game has many technical issues. Starting from the small things, like a really slow screen interface that's super annoying when clicking through dialogues, especially when the highlighted character only has a "goodbye" to say, to a bug that freezes the game right after a shared dinner, which luckily seems to have been fixed in the pre-release patch. But the system requirements are still out of this world, totally not matching the graphics level. My computer isn't the newest, but it can easily handle 60 frames in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.

However, it couldn't handle Tales of the Shire at high settings. The stuttering and fan noise of the graphics card had nothing to do with a stress-free, cozy gaming experience. Even turning on FSR scaling with ultra performance setting didn't help. Only when I lowered the settings to "very low" did all the lags disappear, and the graphics don't look much worse at all - the biggest difference is the reduction in the range of drawing details. With this kind of pastel-colored splashes, this optimization shouldn't really happen, and there's still a lot to fix here.

Patch this and there, and I’ll be back again

What else am I missing in Tales of the Shire? Some random events that could be spotted every day, and some cyclical attractions in the form of traders with unique goods. Other games have shown that this can motivate people to play regularly. The pace here is a bit off - we're bombarded with new features in the first few hours, and then it gets too quiet, too calm. Even the residents don't have casual conversations programmed with us, only those for quests, which also seem to be written by different people who don't have contact with each other. I've seen conversations with the familiar Hobbit several times, who started the conversation as if he was seeing us for the first time.

If someone is looking for a game about cooking and decorating a Hobbit's home just for fun and won't have optimization issues, they will probably get more fun out of Tales of the Shire. I was a bit disappointed and didn't feel the magic of Tolkien's world. The idea was good, but the execution fell a bit short. It's possible that the game will get some updates and add-ons in the future, which could make it much better. If that happens, I'll definitely come back to Bywater!