Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings - Too Cozy for Its Own Good, Too Broken to Be Comforting

What Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings wants to be is obvious the moment it starts, and that’s both its strength and, unfortunately, the root of everything that goes wrong. Released on April 16, 2025, from Wētā Workshop and Private Division, and available on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch, this is a cozy life simulation set during the Third Age of Middle-earth, years before the events of The Lord of the Rings. The pitch is simple: live the life of a hobbit in the scenic little village of Bywater, long before anything involving rings, wraiths, or volcanoes. You’re not here to fight or travel or change the world. You’re here to cook stew, harvest potatoes, and gossip with the neighbors. And when it works, it kind of feels like the game you thought it might be. But only briefly.

You don’t really arrive in Bywater so much as roll in, quietly, in a cart with a long-bearded wizard who is so clearly Gandalf that it almost feels like a joke that he isn’t named. You’ve left Bree behind, with no real reason given, and find yourself the new tenant of a dilapidated hobbit hole that has all the basics, stonework, round door, cozy overgrown garden, but none of the charm yet. The setup unfolds in silence, which is a recurring theme throughout the game, and you’re nudged quickly into your daily routine with very little ceremony. There’s a character creator, which is functional enough; you can choose a name from a list of proper hobbit options, tweak your hair and general appearance, and that’s about the end of your influence over who you’re playing.

And then, well, you begin. What you do each day is some combination of foraging, fishing, gardening, chicken-tending, cooking, and running errands. These errands often involve more of the same—collecting certain mushrooms, catching a specific fish, or delivering a home-cooked meal to someone nearby. It becomes immediately clear that the loop is built around repetition. There are only a few fishing spots, and they never change. You can unlock a new fishing rod by completing a set of fishing-related quests, but you’ll still find yourself reeling in the same handful of fish in the same ponds, which makes the “upgrade” feel cosmetic at best.

Gardening isn’t much deeper. Seasons change every dozen or so in-game days, which is enough to slightly alter the visuals, fall leaves, and spring flowers, but the mechanics don’t evolve with the weather. You can plant seeds, water them, harvest the crops, and do it again. Crops shift slightly depending on the season, and the colors of the foliage around Bywater follow suit, but aside from a few new ingredients, nothing really happens when the calendar turns.

The same can be said for foraging, which is perhaps the most purely mechanical task of the bunch. Every day, you walk the same small map, because the map really is quite small, and collect mushrooms, nuts, berries, and herbs. These respawn daily and can either be sold for money or used as ingredients in your cooking. None of it is difficult, none of it is layered, and none of it changes significantly over time. Once you’ve collected something once, you’ve seen the full extent of what that system can do.

It becomes obvious that all of these systems, fishing, gardening, foraging, and keeping chickens, exist for one reason: to fuel the cooking mechanic, which is the only part of the game that really tries to deepen over time. And to be fair, cooking is where the developers put most of their design energy. Meals are constructed based on a taste profile, which is displayed on a compass with texture and flavor spectrums—smooth to chunky, crisp to tender. Each hobbit has preferences you’ll learn over time, and you can adjust your cooking accordingly. There’s a decent amount of interactivity here; you’ll need to stir sauces, chop ingredients, season your dishes, and then balance the final product to land in the right quadrant of the flavor chart. New tools unlock gradually, such as saucepans that allow you to season food with more precision, and once in a while, it does feel satisfying.

That said, even this central system is wrapped in limitations. You can only invite a few hobbits to eat per day, which puts a cap on how much social progress you can make. The “relationship” system is structured around food—prepare the right dish, serve it, improve your bond—but it rarely leads to anything more than unlocking a new recipe or an additional line or two of dialogue. And this is where one of the game’s biggest issues becomes hard to ignore: there’s no voice acting. None at all. Characters, including major ones like Gandalf and Rosie Cotton, speak through text alone, and while the writing is occasionally pleasant, the absence of voices for such familiar characters makes every interaction feel flat. For a game rooted in one of the richest fictional worlds ever created, the silence is baffling.

There are only about 15 named, fully interactive characters in the game. The rest of the hobbits you see walking around Bywater are essentially set dressing; they don’t speak, can’t be engaged with, and exist only to give the illusion of a populated village. Your actual connections with the core group are shallow. There's no romance, no meaningful branching paths, and certainly no narrative consequences to anything you do. It’s all static, and while the setting tries to be warm and cozy, the people you share it with don’t feel like they live in it.

Your hobbit hole, as a space, is similar. You start with a modest interior and unlock new furniture and decorations over time by completing tasks. Eventually, you get a chicken coop, a proper front door, and more rooms. The decorations are purely visual; they don’t serve any purpose beyond aesthetics, and the house’s layout is fixed. So while it’s satisfying to watch it improve visually, the actual function of the space remains unchanged. Even at its most fully upgraded and picturesque, it still feels more like a backdrop than a home.

But none of these problems, shallow systems, repetitive loops, flat characters, would be dealbreakers if the game were technically solid. It’s not. During my time playing on a high-end PC, I encountered frequent frame rate hitches, texture pop-in, and occasional aliasing that made everything feel rough around the edges. Far worse than any of that were the crashes. The game would frequently crash to desktop, usually after completing meal events, which meant losing progress that had taken up to 30 minutes to collect and prepare for. I had to repeat one in-game day five separate times due to repeated crashes right at the end.

Things were even worse on Nintendo Switch. Visuals were muddy, interactions would freeze mid-dialogue, and a full system reboot was sometimes the only fix. At times, the game looked like something from the GameCube era, not due to stylized design, but from how poorly the assets were rendered. I also played on Steam Deck, which handled the visuals better, but still suffered from bugs, strange glitches (such as my fishing line stretching across the entire map even after putting the rod away), and occasional crashes. A patch dropped near the end of my review window that helped stabilize frame rates slightly, but most of the underlying issues remained.

There’s a version of this game that could have worked, one that leaned more heavily into its setting, gave its characters voices, added mechanical complexity to its systems, and treated relationships with the care they deserved. What’s here feels like the rough sketch of that idea, made up of pleasant art direction, half-realized ideas, and a lot of empty time.

You spend your days cooking, fishing, and gardening. Then you go to sleep. Then you do it again. Then the game crashes. Then you do it again. That’s the rhythm. That’s the loop.

And in the end, for a game about living slowly, Tales of the Shire doesn’t give you much to live for.