Hands On: Can Lord Of The Rings Spice Up A Stale Genre With 'Tales Of The Shire'?

Right at the beginning of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, ‘adventure’ is a bit of a dirty word.

When the wizard Gandalf first meets the timid Bilbo Baggins, a comfort-loving, tobacco-smoking Hobbit, he asks, “I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it’s very difficult to find anyone.” Bilbo’s reply?

“I should think so—in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!”

So, at least at the beginning of the famed Middle-earth adventures, Hobbits aren’t keen to leave their cosy, humble lives. Tales of the Shire from Wētā Workshop – which is most famously known for working on props and special effects for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies – embraces this homely Hobbit vibe for the franchise's first cosy life sim. Despite dabbling in multiple genres over the years, from text adventures, turn-based RPGs, and action adventures, the Hobbits have somehow always been thrust into danger, but Wētā Workshop has seen fit to give the little guys and gals some relief.

When we went to play the game at Summer Game Fest, we were very cautious about Tales of the Shire. The market, and in particular the Switch’s library, is saturated in cosy life-sim games where making friends and living life is the only aim. We even demoed a couple of similar games at Play Days. Fortunately, our doubts were immediately swept away upon picking up the controller.

Tales of the Shire may take place between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, but it’s all about the warm fuzzies, with an art style that feels like a watercolourist’s impression of an idealistic Middle-earth. And it looks great on PC, which is where we demoed the game, so insert your Switch warning/caveat here. But the Hobbits bring their own identity and personality to the game that do make it feel wholly its own thing.

While we were playing the game, we laughed out loud multiple times. The Hobbits are utterly charming, with daft humour and a severe love of food. And this is the heart of Tales of the Shire – food. In the newly-established Bywater, which hasn’t yet been recognised by Hobbiton, your job is to help build a community and relationships with the power of cooking and good food.

We played through two different slices of the game: the beginning, where we settled into our home and got to grips with the basics of cooking; and a mid-game sequence which involved helping a tavern develop some specific dishes. In the former, we were shown around our little Hobbit hut (you’ll be able to create your own Hobbit in the full game, with no restrictions on clothes or genders). There’s a bedroom, a big kitchen, and a little pantry where you can store ingredients. Plus, when you pop your ingredients in the pantry, you’ll see those items reflected in the storeroom in-game.

This is where our Hobbit character was also taught how to cook, which is its own low-pressure minigame. Centering a Hobbit life sim around food is so obvious, but it’s also fairly engaging. You start off with just a chopping board and a mixing bowl, and you can actually affect the food depending on how fine you cut the ingredients up: once or twice means the texture will be chunky, but the more you cut, the finer, and mushier, it’ll get.

It’s not just about the process of cooking, either. Sometimes you’ll need to lay the dish on the table and join your diners for a sit-down meal. It adds to the hearty, family feeling that Tales of the Shire is going for. Putting the dish on the table was a little awkward, but we like the idea of actually hosting the food that we’ve put all of our love and care into.

All of these aspects of preparing and cooking play into the game’s quest system. Other Hobbits living in Bywater will ask you to make dishes in order to improve the town or build relationships, and these increase in difficulty as you progress. Some Hobbits will specify the texture and flavour they're after, and you have more chances to affect these things as you gain more tools and ingredients.

Most of the game's quests come in the form of letters, which you can get from the mailbox outside your house. But as this is a life sim, every single character in Bywater has their own schedule. In games like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing it can sometimes be hard to find each person or memorise their schedule, but in Tales of the Shire, you don’t need to. Opening up the map, you can pull up a list of residents who live in the town. Selecting the person you need, such as the quest giver, will mark their location on the map – even if they’re moving around. The game will then guide you to that person subtly with a bird who will sit on walls and lamps along the way, helping to keep the experience even more stress-free.

In terms of gathering ingredients, you can either forage throughout the town or in the nearby woods, or you can harvest them from your garden. In the second demo, we had multiple planters bursting full of tomatoes, onions, potatoes, mushrooms, and more. And we were told that, depending on what vegetables you plant together, you can actually affect the yield. This means there’s a degree of planning needed to maximise your harvest. You can also move your planters at any time, which allows you to customise your garden to your liking.

Heading into our kitchen, we spotted lots of extra tools now. There was a pickling jar, which makes food crunchier; a pot to boil and make it softer; a frying pan to increase the tenderness; and a pestle and mortar to grind certain foods down. And we also had access to seasonings to affect flavour. From spicy, sour, sweet, and salty, every single ingredient can be individually seasoned.

One of our quests required something spicy, so we checked our recipe book and ingredients to make sure we had the right seasonings – pepper and garlic worked here. With what we had available, we were able to make some spicy fishcakes to the tavern owner’s liking. It, of course, came along with some daft story about how an adventurer may have slayed a dragon – or potentially asked someone else to do it for him. Lazy Hobbits, huh?

There were lots of things we didn’t get a chance to try out during our 30-minute demo, but Tales of the Shire wears its food-loving identity on its sleeve and we walked away genuinely surprised by something that didn't look all that enticing from the outside. You can decorate your Hobbit house, go fishing, and improve relationships with the other Hobbits. It doesn’t feel entirely unique, blending together lots of different elements from other life-sim games, but Tales of the Shire is at least attempting to carve its own identity in the space by focusing on the cooking aspect.

We’ll have to see if the Hobbitses can cook up a storm when the game launches on Switch later this year. Is Tales of the Shire on your wishlist? Spice up the comments below.