A Lord of the Rings cosy game? Made by Weta Workshop, who made the sets, costumes, and props for the beloved Peter Jackson movie trilogy? Say no more, right?
Unfortunately, Tales of the Shire is not the perfect mashup of hobbits and hygge we’ve all been waiting for, but is instead emblematic of the kind of game development that has failed both its employees and its players. Those employees deserve to have their work appraised for the things they did right despite everything, though — so I’ll at least start with that.
The game begins, predictably, with a brief and cheesy Gandalf cameo, and then your custom (hairy-footed!) hobbit is left alone in their new digs to get settled in. You’ve inherited the hobbit hole of the late Old Ruby, who clearly did not much care for the cosy hobbit vibe, because your house is in a total state. The front door doesn’t work, all the gates are smashed in, and there are logs blocking off half the garden… but it wouldn’t really be a cosy game if it didn’t require some virtual elbow grease.
Over time, as you fix up the house, you’ll learn to fish, forage, farm, cook, and befriend the locals, who are trying to incorporate Bywater as an official village — with your quest-based help, of course.
Cooking is the main activity in Tales, and it’s by far the most complicated system. Your meals are defined by two axes, Chunky/Smooth and Crisp/Tender, as well as four flavours — Sweet, Salty, Bitter, and Sour. You’ll have to balance these descriptors to make the perfect meal by chopping, mixing, frying, and seasoning your food, as well as using high-quality ingredients, if you want the hobbits to really like you.
Unsurprisingly, the way to a hobbit’s heart is through their stomach, and this is explored through ‘Shared Meals’, the real heart of the game, which increases friendship, unlocks new recipes, and helps you learn facts about your fellow hobbits — not that there’s a whole lot to learn, because the hobbits as a whole, despite some good writing, lack the depth, personality, and warmth of a Samwise or a Pippin.
In fact, these hobbits seem a lot meaner, as you’ll discover the first time a hobbit sends you a chiding letter, complaining that you haven’t fed them in a while. Ignore their letter, and they’ll go into a sulk. Also, no one ever invites you to a Shared Meal. Rude.
The cooking/hobbit-feeding pipeline is a complex, but necessary system, and it’s hard to learn — but once I got the hang of it, it was quite fun balancing all the figurative spinning plates. It’s just a shame you can’t sell meals, which feels like an odd choice given the game’s focus on them, plus the overall difficulty of making money, thanks to a tiny ten-slot inventory to start with, and a wonky economy where necessary ingredients that you can’t make yourself cost an arm and a (hairy) leg.
Gardening is simpler, but more immediately engaging. It’s all about efficiency: seeds require a certain radius of empty space, so you’ll be squeezing radishes between cauliflowers with but a pixel to spare — and it’s very satisfying when you do — and each plant also has designated ‘companion plants’, which will increase the quality of all the crops involved. The perfect raised bed feels like a masterpiece of hard work (and maths).
Hobbit-hole-decorating is similarly simple, focusing less on ultimate customisation and more on a few select hobbit-y aesthetics. You can change the wood colour, make the walls colourful or brick-lined, put lamps or plants in every doorway, and then you can scatter about a bunch of tasteful Dwarven wood furniture, too. It doesn’t take long until Old Ruby’s mess of a house turns into a lovely hobbit home.
But the dominating feature of this game isn’t the hill-based architecture, or the tea parties with passive-aggressive hobbit friends, or the seed distance calculations — it’s the bugs.
A typical day in Bywater looks like this: My hobbit wakes up, and the game immediately chugs like Pippin downing a full pint. She skips into town, and discovers ten hobbits amassed outside the pub because they’ve all got stuck on one another. She goes into a shop, and the screen turns grey, except for the bottom-left corner, so she has to navigate out using just that small sliver of visuals.
She decides to take a walk in the forest, so she heads out, passing a hobbit with no textures having a conversation with no one, and then the screen goes red (with black spots!) for a few minutes, until it stops doing that for no reason. She gives up on the forest and goes fishing instead, only the fishing UI isn’t visible, and the controller is aggressively vibrating like a jar filled with angry wasps and rice. Finally, she decides to go home, but since it’s been exactly 30 minutes since her day started, the game crashes.
Since I started playing, several of those have been patched (I had a total of 20 hard crashes in 10 hours before they patched out that last bug), but I’m still getting crashes, the textures still aren’t loading, and the game still chugs horrendously. Plus, on Switch, it looks bad, as you can probably tell from the screenshots, and the pop-in is pretty egregious, with critters and trees loading in just inches from your face. I hope for more patches to come, but there are a lot of things to fix.
Ultimately, Tales of the Shire is a tale as old as time: a mismanaged mess, rushed out the door with a lack of respect for the players or the game’s developers, who deserved more time to finish it properly, and clearly cared tremendously about it. But according to reports featuring voices from inside the studio, the project suffered from a lack of experience, direction, and support, as well as layoffs, delays, publisher shutdowns, poor management, and crunch.
Those challenges seem to have led to a game that’s muddled at best, and unplayable at worst, and it’s just not worth what it apparently cost the people who made it. It’s hard to enjoy a ‘wholesome’ game knowing that the story of its development is reportedly deeply unwholesome. But as long as the games industry keeps chewing people up and spitting them out instead of supporting and growing talent, this tale will keep repeating itself. And that’s not cosy at all.
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