Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game review for PC, Nintendo Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X

Pretty much everything you need to know about Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game is captured within the first thirty minutes or so of the game: Gandalf drops you off in the Shire, almost immediately you have to cook a meal for a hobbit, and then you’re sent running back and forth across the Shire on a mindless errand.

Just imagine doing that for a dozen-plus hours, and you’ve got a sense of everything that’s waiting for you in Tales of the Shire.

Of course, for some people that may sound idyllic. While it’s been quite a while since I read any Tolkien, one thing I definitely remember is that he made the life of the hobbits seem focused on nothing more than rest and relaxation (when they weren’t off saving Middle-earth, of course). Endless meals, lots of socializing, and enough tending to the land to get by – hardly glamorous, but definitely appealing if you’re not in the mood for adventures.

And that’s certainly reflected in Tales of the Shire. If you just want to spend hours and hours planting and harvesting crops, fishing, and making meals – the latter being the most important – this is the game for you. The meals matter most since the way to a hobbit’s heart is through its stomach, and you succeed in Tales of the Shire by making as many friends as possible. Make a lot of meals, you win a lot of friends.

When you get tired of that, you also get to decorate your hobbit-hole, moving things around and making it feel homey. You can gradually expand your space as you unlock more items, but the focus is all about making your home as cozy as possible.

And if you want anything deeper than that, you’re not likely to find it here. Tales of the Shire is an extremely simple game, asking you to do the same chores over and over again and never really expanding beyond that. You can occasionally unlock new things or have a new season roll in, but it’s not like the basic gameplay look ever changes. You’re constantly grinding away, gathering more supplies to make more meals and then feeding those meals to other hobbits, repeating ad infinitum.

Again, if you’re a certain type of person, I can see the appeal in all that – not just if you’re a Lord of the Rings fan, but if you generally like cozy life-sims and don’t want anything too complicated or troubling in your games. Tales of the Shire is nothing if not low stakes and low stress. But it also makes for an extremely dull experience if you want even the slightest bit more than that, which makes it very hard to recommend.

Private Division provided us with a Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game PC code for review purposes.