Tales of the Shire hands-on preview – You provide the potatoes, I’ll make a second breakfast!

I’ve played plenty of cozy style games from Stardew Valley to Sims to Disney Dreamlight. However, nothing could prepare me for the announcement of Tales of the Shire. I was pumped from the get-go, I mean, come on… Hobbits in the Shire and you get to be one?! So when I found out Tales of the Shire was going to be at Summer Game Fest I threw myself at the opportunity to see if it was going to live up to the hype in my head. Well, fellow Lord of the Rings fans, it looks like it’ll take hours of my life away in the best way possible.

Tales of the Shire is a 3D, 3rd person cozy game following a Hobbit of your creation. You have the ability to make your Hobbit any way you want. They have sliders for height and plumpness, while also having quite a lot of cosmetic choices such as hair style, eye color, foot hair, and more. To give us as much time as we could during the preview, they built us a character, but they expect people will take quite a while making their Hobbit everything they want them to be. I ended up having some extra time at the end of my preview, so I messed around with the character creation and had a ton of fun making a great combination.

In Tales of the Shire, your job is to be a Hobbit and everything that entails. You’ll be farming outside your home, fishing, collecting items needed for cooking and crafting, and more. However, one of the best things I found out is you’ll be able to throw dinner parties with guests you invite from around the area. We had a tutorial of this with a friend who introduced us to our home and our kitchen. We make our friend a nice soup and have a very laid back dinner party to introduce us to the concept. I did talk to the guide for the preview and the dinner parties will level up in difficulty depending on who the guest is, how many guests there are, etc.

Making food wasn’t overly complicated but wasn’t easy either. It was a great sweet spot of the two. You’ll have to take time to figure out how to make the best dishes before serving them at a party. For instance, we had to make some food that was salty to help a cook out with a new recipe. You’ll have control of the ways of cooking as well with the ability to chop and use the pan to cook it up. There is a little box on the side of the cooking screen that shows you the goal and shows how far you are one way or another on the different spectrums of salty, sweet, tender, etc. The level of detail on the cooking is great and really hits the Hobbit mindset of food preparation. The kitchen is actually one of the only things in your house not broken down as you enter it for the first time.

Speaking of your house, or Hobbit Hole, you’ll be able to change things about it such as the floors and walls with no cost to you in your ingredients. That means you have full control to make your Hobbit Hole into the home of your dreams. I found myself having a great time figuring out which combinations of things looked the best for each room I walked through. I’m sure people will have a field day making their Hobbit Holes as unique as they are. You can also move all the furniture to the way you want it. I ended up making a secret room that only I can open (since only I have the god-power of moving my furniture). That’ll mean that we WON’T be recreating the “That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates” scene from the animated 1977 The Hobbit movie in MY home.

Some of the quality of life items I loved during my preview were the skipping, birds, and day/season cycles. While Hobbits don’t rush their lives around, we the players might want to move faster. So, instead of giving us a run button, we get a skip button and our Hobbit will skip and bound around the Shire with a big ‘ol smile on their face. It actually moves faster than you might expect and it’s a fun way to get around. While moving around, once you get something marked on your map, little birds will lead the way over your head. For example, we had to visit a cook at the local eatery. From my house to the location, we had a bird that showed us which way to go. This was an easy and fun way to get around without having to open and close the map.

Alongside all of this is the fact you don’t HAVE to deal with everything in a timed situation like in Stardew Valley, you can get things done at your own pace. You will experience the seasons of time though, as spring to summer to fall to winter, the team for Tales of the Shire has thought and worked through the lore of J.R.R. Tolkien to make sure that everything fits into things lore-wise. They have people on their staff whose job is to make sure everything is accurate to the lore. Even though it’s winter, they made sure that the type of snow and amount of snow fit what J.R.R. Tolkien had envisioned for The Shire. They even went as far as to create traders whose job is to sell you items that cannot be canonically found in The Shire.

This entire game seems like a love-letter to The Shire and the fans of the franchise. I truly believe I’ll lose so many hours playing this fantastical game, and who knows what guests might show their face in The Shire given it’s set in between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings! We’ll see later this year when the game comes out.

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