Tales of the Shire Is Charming, Broken, and Barely Playable

Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game is out now, and it’s not the cozy fantasy experience players hoped for. Set in the peaceful village of Bywater, this life-sim gives you the chance to live out a hobbit’s quiet countryside dreams. But while the idea sounds great on paper, the game’s full release is messy, undercooked, and riddled with bugs.

GameSpot’s review, written by Jessica Cogswell, paints a clear picture. The game has some fun ideas and a genuine love for its source material, but poor execution and technical issues weigh it down from the start.

The journey begins with your hobbit arriving in Bywater after leaving Bree. You get to create your character with a few options — not much depth in the creator, but enough to craft someone who fits into the world. After a quiet ride with a wizard who is very obviously not Gandalf, the game eases you into its mechanics. There’s cooking, foraging, fishing, gardening, and bartering. The loop is built around gathering ingredients and making food to share with neighbors. The game even uses a unique grid mechanic for its cooking minigames, where you align meals by texture and style. It’s one of the few parts that feels fresh.

If you suddenly feel like trying to play the game, then check out its system requirements – everything is quite simple there, and we'll move on!

The idea behind this setup is solid. Instead of focusing on romance or city building like other life sims, Tales of the Shire is more about building trust with locals and becoming a real part of the community. You don’t show up as the town’s savior. In fact, you’re barely noticed at all, and that dynamic feels a little more grounded compared to other games in the genre.

But the charm wears off fast. The game suffers from a complete lack of momentum. Without romance options, gifts, or meaningful relationship systems, there’s little reason to care about the other hobbits. The quest design boils down to simple fetch tasks, and the characters you’re supposed to bond with feel lifeless. There’s no voice acting, minimal music, and very few sound effects. It creates a flat, awkward atmosphere that makes even small interactions feel hollow.

Bywater itself doesn’t help. While the size of the town is decent, it doesn’t feel alive. Most of the hobbits aren’t even real NPCs — they’re just background filler. Only 15 characters can actually be interacted with, which makes the town feel more like a stage set than a real place. Seasons change, but that’s about the only sign of life you’ll notice. Even your own dialogue options often feel disconnected from what’s actually happening in the game. It becomes a loop of talking, cooking, and gathering that never really grows into anything more.

The lack of progression systems also makes everything feel optional. There’s no strong narrative push or mechanical incentive to keep going. Sure, it might be thematically accurate for hobbits to ignore ambition and just enjoy life, but games still need structure to be engaging. Without something to work toward, Tales of the Shire ends up feeling more like a tech demo than a finished title.

The experience only gets worse once you start running into technical problems. And there are plenty. The game struggles to run well even on hardware that can handle much bigger titles. On Nintendo Switch, it’s rough. Items glitch through each other, screens go black during dialogue, and it crashes often. The graphics look severely outdated — not stylistically retro, just low-quality. Some areas look like they were ripped from the GameCube era.

Switch issues are one thing, but even on Steam Deck, the problems don’t go away. The visuals are slightly better, but bugs, crashes, and freezes are still common. It’s playable in the strictest sense, but the experience remains dull and broken across platforms.

It’s disappointing because the core ideas aren’t bad. The cooking system is solid. The quiet approach to community-building has potential. And the writing, while light, includes some clever lines. But nothing is pushed far enough. Characters don’t grow. Storylines don’t develop. The world doesn’t evolve. What you get at the beginning is more or less what you’ll have throughout.

The game wants to deliver a laid-back, cozy vibe, but instead, it just feels incomplete. Decorating your hobbit hole is one of the few things that feels satisfying. At least you can make your home feel lived in — because the rest of the village doesn’t. And with so few mechanics to dive into, the whole experience becomes a matter of repeating the same basic tasks while ignoring bugs and hoping the game doesn’t crash.

Cogswell’s review makes it clear: Tales of the Shire isn’t ready. It needed more time, more polish, and a stronger vision. The cozy life-sim genre is already crowded, and players expect more than a themed reskin. Without meaningful progression, deeper mechanics, or technical stability, this game doesn’t have a reason to stand out.

Even fans of The Lord of the Rings will struggle to find something to hold onto. There’s no epic story. No meaningful lore integration. Just a few name drops and the general setting of the Shire. That might have been enough if the game underneath it all worked, but it doesn’t.

Tales of the Shire isn’t the worst game in the world. It’s just not finished. And in a genre where polish and comfort are everything, that’s a dealbreaker. A handful of good ideas buried under weak design and rough performance isn’t enough. For now, it’s hard to recommend even to the most devoted hobbit fans.