Tales Of The Shire: A The Lord Of The Rings Game review – Animal Crossing with hobbits

The latest Lord Of The Rings game is a cosy village simulator by Wētā Workshop but are they as good at making games as they are special effects?

When you hear the name Wētā Workshop, the first thing that springs to mind is the astonishing (at the time) visual effects for The Lord of the Rings movies and their various decreasingly interesting offshoots. What’s less well known is that while Wētā is primarily a special effects company they also do various other things, including making tabletop games. So far that’s included District 9: The Board Game and GKR: Heavy Hitters, but now they’ve decided to have a go at making a video game as well.

The result is Tales Of The Shire: A Lord Of The Rings Game. It’s all about hobbits, but this time rather than setting off for Mordor to toss a demonic ring into a volcano, here you stay happily in the Shire, specifically in Bywater. At the beginning of the game the county assessor decides it’s not even worthy of being called a village, so it’s up to you and your fellow Bywater residents to change that.

You do that by making friends and setting up the institutions necessary for somewhere to be considered a village. The rules for such things are fairly nebulous and still mention wolves and goblins, which haven’t been seen in the Shires for a long time. None of that really matters though, because soon enough you’ve got a laundry list of cosy quests to undertake.

In keeping with the way the Shire is depicted in Tolkien’s books, and more saliently in the films, that means wandering Bywater’s lanes and bridges, helping people and foraging for ingredients. That’s important because perhaps the most significant distraction in Tales Of The Shire is cooking for friends.

Heading to the kitchen in your recently inherited hobbit hole, you’ll find a chopping board and saucepans. Provided you have all the necessary ingredients, making a recipe takes a few taps to complete, its test of skill is in achieving the right flavour and texture. The latter is governed by the number of times you chop each ingredient before adding it to the pot. Get it just right and your meal will be extra delicious.

The meals themselves are vehicles for building relationships. Heading to your writing desk, conveniently placed next to your hobbit hole’s dining table, you compose invitations to townsfolk to come and dine with you. You soon learn what they like and dislike and tailoring the meals you serve – and making sure they’re as tasty and texturally pleasing as you can – helps level up friendships.

Finding ingredients can be a bit of a trick though. While your garden comes with five planters to grow herbs, fruits, and vegetables it’ll take a good few hours before you can afford to add more. It also takes quite some time for each plant to grow. Watering them speeds up the process slightly, but you mustn’t overdo it and it’s often easier to forage or buy what you need if you’re in even a slight hurry.

Fellow hobbits are forever writing you notes, which appear in the American-style postbox outside your house, and these often contain new side quests, as well as replies to your dinner invitations. Unfortunately, as you start digging deeper into your expanding to-do list, it becomes painfully clear that almost everything you do is an extended, multi-part fetch quest.

A brief conversation directs you to a hobbit on the other side of town, who needs you to speak to someone else next to the lake, who would be very grateful if you’d collect an item on their behalf, before returning to the first hobbit. After minimal chat they give you a reward, completing the quest and freeing you up to get on with the next one, which to nobody’s surprise means walking to the other side of town, where the process starts again.

The end result is that you spend most of your time in transit. Fortunately, that’s easily Tales Of The Shire’s strongest suit. That’s because despite looking like a PlayStation 3 game, its landscapes really are beautifully designed. Colourful flowers and elegantly proportioned hobbit holes are connected by little bridges, tunnels though hollow tree trunks, and perfectly manicured country lanes.

Butterflies flit past, townsfolk go about their business, and every day has a cadence that takes you from early dawn to night, with village life going on around you. Seasons pass, with summer giving way to autumn, followed by winter, and the things you can forage or fish for change along with them. The game does a convincing impression of a real living ecosystem.

Similarly brilliant is the way you navigate. After tracking an objective, birds flutter ahead of you, perching on whichever arm of a signpost you’ll need to follow, or on bridges and arches over the road, leading you where you need to go without once needing to use a map or draw any crude HUD markers. It works really well and fits sympathetically with the rustic setting.

Unfortunately, character designs and animation are more of an acquired taste, the game’s cartoonish hobbits are permanently leaning over backwards whether walking, skipping or just standing around. They all do it, it looks utterly bizarre, and it doesn’t seem to have any motivation beyond a peculiar choice by the art department. We found the hobbits profoundly ugly to look at, in stark contrast to the countryside they inhabit.

The real problem though, is the gameplay. Aside from cooking and fishing, the overwhelming preponderance of time you spend in Tales Of The Shire is merrily skipping from one place to another. You can’t take shortcuts, with Bywater’s organic-looking trails and fields actually turning out to be rigidly controlled corridors, and with so many tasks involving traversal, you just walk and walk and walk.

It’s grindingly tedious and makes you realise the skill with which the Animal Crossing games have been put together. Even though superficially similar, Animal Crossing manages to weave warmly likeable characters and involving miniature stories out of its island paradises. By contrast, there’s something depressingly flat about Tales Of The Shire. There’s also a fine line between cosy and cloyingly twee.

While it’s entirely possible that small children will find something alluring in the non-violent, bucolic setting, and continual mind-numbing repetition, they would be infinitely better off playing Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley or virtually any other cosy game. Despite its cheerful demeanour, Tales Of The Shire is a grim, drudge-filled reminder that looking cute is no substitute for gameplay.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £29.99
Publisher: Private Division
Developer: Wētā Workshop
Release Date: 29th July 2025
Age Rating: 3

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