Tales of the Shire is not the game it could’ve been. The bones of bigger ideas poke through, at times. You can see the vast scope and magic the game’s development team intended, when mysterious strangers enter your village of Bywater, or when throwaway lines of dialogue reference wider Lord of the Rings lore. This game was clearly intended to be bigger, more magical, and a lot more stable. But even with performance issues, light grind, and a melancholy sense of emptiness in its later stages, it still has just enough charm to be endearing, in a patchwork way.
If this game was targeted at anyone, it was targeted at me. I’ve been to New Zealand three times in my life, twice as a Tolkien tourist. Visiting the Hobbiton movie set in Matamata was life-changing, for me. It was years ago now, but the memories linger – the beauty of the garden paths, the bright greens of grasses, the smell of fresh flowers, and sharing a drink in the wonderfully refined Green Dragon replica. It’s a magical place, and one I’ve longed to revisit.
Tales of the Shire attempts to capture that same movie magic, and gets plenty of the way there in its design. As you wander the virtual village Bywater (which is not strictly a village until you make it so), you’ll come across familiar sights and sounds, if you’re into Lord of the Rings.
From a home that resembles Bag End, you’ll wander garden paths filled with all sorts of collectibles – herbs, nuts, and other forageables – and nod to your nearest neighbours. You live with the Cottons and Burrows, and all manner of other Hobbit families, as a newcomer finding their (hairy) feet.
A cosy life in Tales of the Shire
Your quest is not only to settle in and make a peaceful life for yourself, it’s also to address a range of village challenges, while making friends by cooking meals and growing crops. Tales of the Shire is surprisingly quest-oriented which seems in defiance of its cosy nature. Initially, I had assumed this game would tread in the footsteps of Stardew Valley, offering opportunities to farm, fish, and explore at length. It’s actually more accurate to describe this as an adventure game, with its cosy setting serving as a launch pad for individual quests.
As you travel through Bywater, wandering its bright and beautiful natural world, you’ll meet all sorts of folks in need of aid. Sometimes, they only require your company. Hobbits are very friendly folks, and will become sad if you don’t hang out with them or invite them to a meal sometime. Other times, quests will take you all across Bywater, on missions to complete one task or another.
When you enter Bywater, for example, it’s struggling to be recognised as an actual village. So you must set about improving it, by strengthening everyone’s relationships, as well as taking on fetch quest missions that illuminate more about your friends and their personalities.
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What eventually devolves into meandering ‘go there, do this’ repetition is mostly saved by the vivaciousness of the game’s writing. Each Hobbit pal has their own distinct personality, with some being incredibly mean or jealous, and others being homely and welcoming. You’ve got a core cast of characters to please, all of whom pop in and out of the story as it unravels. And yes, there are characters from The Lord of the Rings itself, who help to add that sense of grandeur and storytelling to the background of the game.
A beautiful life, but a limited scope
Even with these references, Tales of the Shire feels small in scope, with an overarching focus on farming and cooking, over anything else. Primarily, you’ll spend your time gathering vegetables, fruits, spices, nuts, and meat to create meals, and then you’ll share those meals with your Hobbit friends, in exchange for new recipes and items to decorate your home.
You can only earn money in this game by selling your grown crops or foraging, which can be incredibly limiting, and eventually, very repetitive. When you’re low on cash to buy seeds, you’ll need to wander the game’s open world and find forageables to sell instead. For the first hours, this is completely fine – but ten hours in, when you’re having to set out once more to gather twigs, berries, and herbs, the process grates. You’ve also got a relative small backpack to begin, so you’ll be hauling items backwards and forwards between shops, eventually begrudging the journey.
This back and forth is also complicated by a strange quirk of design: there is no mini-map on screen as you travel. If you want to get from one place to another, you’ll have to select it on a secondary map screen, and then follow blue birds that land on sign posts in one direction or another. It’s a novel guidance system, but when you’re really in a rush to dump produce or head back home before sunset, having to navigate by bird is a frustration.
Tales of the Shire is full of moments of friction like this. Certain parts of town are cut off by closed gates until much later in the game, or until you forge a particular friendship. You can’t access your Hobbit home by the front door until certain criteria is met. It’s also very easy to get lost in the world, without that mini-map to guide you.
Another point of friction, you’ll uncover right when the plot begins to spark. Hours in, you’ll eventually stumble into a questline about making Bywater a fully-fledged village. It’s very quirky and fun, and gets the whole town involved, so you feel like you’re part of a cosy little world of friends. But then the issue emerges: you get one big quest, and you must then wait until the next day for the plot to advance. With the game’s story being surprisingly linear, with relatively few alternative quest lines or activities to entertain, you can find yourself stuck for whole days, with nothing to do.
You wait for the day to tick over to night, you sleep, and when you wake up, you complete one more part of the quest, only to have to wait again. It feels like an artificial way to truncate days in Tales of the Shire, stretching out the game’s plot across a longer period. While it also serves as encouragement to venture widely across Bywater, at a certain point in the day, when the crops have been watered or harvested, and forgeables have been sold off, there’s nothing else to do, really.
There’s no deeper questlines to pursue. Even inviting Hobbits to a meal will mean a day’s wait in the meantime. Cooking must be done sparingly, as ingredients are limited and hard to come by, and some are even dependent on seasons. Tales of the Shire‘s version of fishing is fun, but there’s only so many dozens of fish you can catch before you realise you’re just trying to waste time.
There is a simple solution here: let players go to bed when they choose, to speed the plot along at their own pace. But Tales of the Shire is determined to make you sit back and relax, and let go of ideas of progress. When you want to see and do everything, to devour it all as soon as possible, Tales of the Shire is not the most forthcoming experience.
All this to say, I still enjoyed my time with the game. It’s a bit unpolished and janky, and on Steam Deck it has consistent frame rate issues. But the fantasy of living as a Hobbit, in a world where time doesn’t matter, is fairly well-realised in Tales of the Shire – or at least, as realised as it’s ever been. Sitting back and watering crops, and taking time to cook meals, determining spices and flavours, is joyful. Wandering Bywater for the first time is lovely. The game’s cast is bright and wonderful, and getting to know characters like Nefi the Dwarf is delightful.
At a certain point, it became clear that Tales of the Shire had shown me everything it had to offer. With locked pathways and little secrets hiding in town, I overestimated the game’s scope and direction at first, assuming it would be bigger and more impressive in parts. While it never quite met those expectations, I did find a peace in lowering my expectations, adhering to a slower pace, and spending time with my new Hobbit friends.
Tales of the Shire isn’t quite the game I wanted it to be, but for the hours I wandered Bywater, I still came away dreaming of my new, cosy life in The Shire.
Three stars: ★★★
Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game
Platform(s): PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch
Developer: Weta Workshop
Publisher: Private Division
Release Date: 29 July 2025
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A PC copy of Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game was provided by the publisher and played on both PC and Steam Deck for the purposes of this review.
Developer
Weta Workshop
Publisher:
Private Division
Release Date:
29 July 2025
