REVIEW: ‘Tales Of The Shire’ Has Magic, Even If Its Sometimes Hard To Find

Developed by Wētā Workshop and published by Private Division, Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of The Rings Game is best described as a cozy Hobbit life sim set in Middle-earth’s Third Age. By using J.R.R. Tolkien’s smallest people, Tales of the Shire aims to deliver a community story.

Living in a hole in the ground right now sounds like the perfect thing to do. “Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing to sit down on or eat” but “A hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.” Tales of the Shire’s entire point is to be a hobbit. 

In the game, you play as a hobbit who has come to Bywater. Throughout the game’s narrative, you perform simple chores, cook meals, and bond with the people around you to build Bywater into a place recognized as an official village. This involves completing fetch quests for the other residents of Bywater, cooking meals, and having dinner with different members of the community to strengthen your relationships with them, and essentially moves forward as many games in the genre do.

More importantly, this game establishes a unique identity in games about Middle-earth: it’s cozy. Despite what those who have only watched the Peter Jackson trilogy will say, Tolkien’s world isn’t just about swords and great wars. It’s also about the things we protect and fight for, and the joy that makes that space perfect. Games, in kind, don’t always need to be a world-saving battle or struggle against dark forces.

Instead, we see Bywater as a warm and joyful place. The land, the houses, the Green Dragon, all of it is wonderfully developed. While the characters don’t always look perfect in terms of visual design, the environment in Tales of the Shire is powerful. The calmness and the joy come out across the landscape—if only it were larger. 

Comfort and coziness are the core of Tales of the Shire, and that’s its strength. 

Tales of the Shire hits every box on the cozy game list. You craft, cook, decorate, garden, customize, fish, and explore the Shire. To the Green Dragon and more, Tales of the Shire is just life. It’s a cute and cozy life, but that’s it. Tales of the Shire has over 100 recipes, and cooking those recipes isn’t just pressing one button. You individually prepare each item and then cook the meal entirely. 

Tales of the Shire also focuses heavily on replicating Hobbit life as you explore and build your life in Bywater. This stems from a slower-paced day/night system, emphasizing the importance of inviting your neighbors to dinner and bartering, rather than focusing on accumulating gold. 

One of the first things to note is that you can customize your character, adjusting everything from body size and ears to skin color, hair, and even the hair on your hobbit feet. While the skin-tones aren’t too robust, especially when in indoor lighting, and hairstyles leave a lot to be desired when it comes to curly hair, my Hobbit is probably one of my favorite characters I’ve created in a game. She’s cute, she has glasses, and she fits me. Still, there isn’t much in the way of customizing fashion.

On the other side, decorating your Hobbit hole isn’t focused on creating any buffs or increasing any beauty score; it’s just about making it cozy. This is one area where I am okay with being minimalist. I just want to make my Hobbit hole mine, put up books, change the doorways, and design it my way. Customization is just enough to keep you enjoying your home. 

Customization in Tales of the Shire may be light, but it is still endearing. 

Sure, you can’t adjust the floorplan, and the furniture catalogue doesn’t hit the highs of live-service cozy games, but it is still a fun and endearing element in the game. In fact, while not much of the game goes below the surface in terms of systems depth for your chores, Tales of the Shire is endlessly endearing. 

The most robust system that Tales of the Shire embraces is its cooking mini-games. To make recipes, chopping items to the correct consistency and matching flavors are key. Additionally, like any good Hobbit community, food plays a key role in the narrative’s progression. It’s a choice that really captures the beauty of being a hobbit.

We all know about second breakfast and elevensies, but as much as it’s a cute joke to make, Tales of the Shire understands the importance of a meal. It connects people, solves problems, and allows us all to meet each other on a common ground. While the quest to make Bywater into a recognized village continues, the narrative is tied to how connected you are to the people around you, and the dinner table (or breakfast table) is where you do that work.

The largest hindrance to cooking is that its system depth is the ultimate goal of all the other tasks. Trading, fishing, farming, gathering—all of it is just to make more food. And while that loop can work for those of us totally content picking berries in the forest for hours, the small map size makes it more difficult to find joy in the other daily tasks. Still, though, if you are a player who likes gathering for the sake of it, it’s hard to say that this is a dealbreaker. 

Food is central to life, both in the Shire and in real life, and that’s captured in this game.

As the story progresses, you unlock new items that add more detail to the recipes that you’re making. While that’s a good thing, the pacing of learning new recipe skills is just a tad too slow to facilitate a masterclass in cooking.

The best part of the daily tasks is tending to the chickens, which also allows you to expand your yard. Adorable little birds that follow you; they capture one of the primary reasons I appreciate Tales of the Shire—it just makes me smile. Wandering through the town is magical when you first do it. With birds guiding your path, the mini-horses and the other animals add to Bywater’s charm.

While the narrative weight of cooking is key in Tales of the Shire, it’s hard not to compare the game’s cooking mechanics to another cozy game, Singularity Six’s Palia. Which ultimately leads me to less of a critique of the game itself, more so pointing to a missed opportunity: its lack of co-op.

While a Hobbit hole is about comfort, Hobbits also thrive on community. It’s something that the game’s dinner table mechanic expounds on—its most powerful message. However, as cozy games become increasingly dependent on co-op to drive replayability, this is what prevents Tales of the Shire from reaching its full potential. After about 10 hours in the game, it’s easy to lull into a slow pace. With fewer to-dos and only small amounts of interactions with your neighbors in Bywater, the game starts to feel a tad empty. 

Tales of the Shire does offer surface-level social simulation mechanics that genuinely align with what we see in the genre more broadly. You can invest time with residents of Bywater, talk with them, eat with them, become friends, and complete a larger 25-hour narrative. However, even with some extremely clever writing and well-thought-out humor, the story is hampered by the lack of voice acting. Yet another thing that co-op helps alleviate.

Wētā Workshop missed the opportunity to overcome some of its issues by not developing co-op.

Now, Tales of the Shire’s traditional farming sim qualities are enough to create a core gameloop of chores, but it’s missing the key factor that makes all of Hobbiton so important. While adding more narrative adventure and community-building elements with NPCs is one way to tackle this, another approach is to incorporate multiplayer. 

It’s a miss that any cozy game released after Palia will ultimately feel, but it’s also what makes the game feel stunted. As the genre has expanded, there isn’t too much to keep you invested unless you’re someone like me who is just deeply in love with Tolkien’s Middle-earth and its stories. And even then, there were moments I would put Tales of the Shire down and not head back to it. Not because it was bad, but because it just didn’t draw me back in. 

Tales of the Shire also had some significant technical issues on PC. A few crashes, framerate issues, and constant clipping were the three points of frustration. However, with the pre-patch launch, most of these issues have been resolved. While some graphical inconsistencies remain, they have improved significantly since the preview. At least compared to the Switch port moments I’ve seen.

Ultimately, the game captures the popular hyperstylized visuals that many cozy games often find themselves nestled within, but it truly shines when examining the animals throughout the village.

Tales of the Shire’s technical issues and simple systems hold the game back.

While Tales of the Shire offers customization options for your home, the main issue, whether it’s placing food on the table or trying to move furniture, is the awkward camera angles. This is due in large part to the only indicator of item placement being a small rippling area. Everything else stays the same, meaning that as you move your character, you also move the thing that you are holding (read: hovering 5 ft away from you), making a lot of the placement for small items a task without much precision. 

Even with room for improvement, the reality is that Tales of the Shire just fits the mold. While this isn’t bad, it falls short of reaching the top of the cozy game genre. While I did love the comfort the game gave me, the simplicity of being a Hobbit, and the importance of a meal, Tales of the Shire is sometimes too trapped in the past. Had this game been released before some genre-defining titles in terms of exploration, social sims, and co-op, it could have been great. But because it exists in an ever-evolving landscape, this slice of social sim is just fine. 

There is something magical in Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of The Rings Game, but it’s sometimes hard to find it. Renditions of locations and people from Tolkien’s work will bring a smile to your face. The animal design will make you giggle, but the daily tasks can often fall flat. But sometimes just fine is enough. Still, while I keep thinking that a Hobbit hole means comfort, Tolkien’s favorite characters also deserve a bit more depth than just resting on genre fundamentals. 

Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of The Rings Game is available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC July 29, 2025.