We live in the midst of a plethora of Middle Earth media. The wretched Gollum game from last year, the apparent Gollum of 2026 Duology, The Rings of Power‘s Elf Kings, War of the Rohirrim‘s Horse Maidens and other video games of varying scope and theme are reportedly on the way.
And yet none of this offers what I really want to see from a Tolkien adaptation: something with a completely different aesthetic and tone than Peter Jackson’s 2001 film trilogy. Middle-earth contains more people than can fit into those three films, and it’s a shame that the setting has been limited by their success.
But this week I was able to watch the best reinterpretation of a Lord of the Rings adaptation I have basically ever seen: Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game. ToTS is the inaugural project from the game studio of “Rings” film veteran Wētā Workshop and was developed in collaboration with Private Division. And from what I was able to play of this long-awaited “comfortable hobbit life” simulator, the studio has hit the jackpot.
In April, the game’s first full trailer promised friendship mechanics, cooking, fishing, home decorating, farming, seasonal changes, and other standards of the life simulation genre. The demo, which Polygon was able to play this week, included Tales from the ShireThe player takes on the role of a newly arrived hobbit in the village of Bywater, which is only a few days’ march from Hobbiton (the home of Bilbo and Frodo) and the human town of Bree (where the inn “The Dancing Pony” is located).
My three hours with Tales from the Shire were played on PC, although I also experimented a bit by streaming it to my Steam Deck, where the controls were even more intuitive than with a keyboard and mouse. After activating the demo on Steam, I opened the achievement list for fun. At the top was one for owning at least three vests.
I immediately considered this a good omen.
Image: Wētā Workshop/Private Division
After a brief opening cutscene, I was presented with a wonderfully robust character editor that included an unexpectedly advanced 5-point gender slider (at one end, waists were slim and cleavage was prominent, at the other, it was the other way around), as well as the absolutely unique option to customize my character’s foot hair.
Players can enter their own first and last names, but they also have the option to choose from two extensive lists of names that appear to have been copied directly from hobbits mentioned in Tolkien’s work. That said, I didn’t check every name against the books, but I was able to scroll down the list and give my hobbit exactly the canonical first name I was looking for: that of one of Bilbo’s uncles, Polo Baggins. Not only was this another good omen, it was a princely gift.
Tales from the Shire shows a clear and immediate insight into the duality of Tolkien’s hobbits – they have a great capacity for being loyal, open, brave and robust, which is all the more surprising given that they tend to be petty, conservative and frivolous. One of the first things you learn from Orlo Proudfoot, the hobbit who welcomes you to Bywater, is that big people settle their differences with swords and arrows, but hobbits do so by inviting people over for home-cooked meals. The equation of ToTSThe very relaxed cooking and eating mechanics, right up to the fighting, gave the whole thing a passive-aggressive framework that immediately felt like a part of Tolkien’s Hobbits.
Case in point: I had to giggle when I realized that my first major questline involved helping a down-to-earth farmer win an argument with the snooty miller over some completely inconsequential local issue. On GodFarmer Cotton and I wanted to rub it in Sandyman’s, the miller’s, nose. His son is a cowardly little collaborator anyway.
But one corroborating example: although you didn’t know her, you inherit your house from a beloved old hobbit lady who recently passed away, and an early quest has you invite two of her former students to dinner, giving them new happy memories of a place that was recently filled with sadness. Bywater has a nice sense of history, delivered bit by bit in snippets of conversation, and the game wants you to think about how you fit in.
Image: Wētā Workshop/Private Division
Even when preparing the dishes for this meal, it was clear that this was going to be a satisfying loop. Invite your guests, wake up on the day of the event, check the game menu to see what they’re craving, choose your recipes, and gather your ingredients (fishing, gathering, and gardening were among the options available in the demo). Your pantry, by the way, visually fills up with the food you put in it. If you store a tomato, the basket for tomatoes fills up. If you store mustard greens, the spot on the table where the mustard greens go is covered in mustard greens. It’s incredibly charming.
Then you cook: choosing ingredients sets values such as taste and deliciousness, but the cooking mini-game allows you to optimize the ideal consistency by using all the tools available in your kitchen (in this demo, only the cutting board and the frying pan). Then you receive your guests, arrange the 3D objects of your finished dishes on the table and collect the rewards of “Fellowship” points, gifts and story progress.
The few days I spent in-game with the demo were enough to get me agonizingly close to, but not reaching, my first major story goal (hosting enough brunches with my neighbors to be accepted as a Bywater “local”). And, dear reader, I long for it. I’ve sent out lunch invitations and now I can’t keep them.
I would say that I spent most of my time in the game looking for NPCs to talk to rather than specifically gathering ingredients, repairing/decorating my somewhat run-down house, or cooking; there were many tutorial quests to complete. And while the scenery extremely charming, I could imagine that all this walking around would get a bit boring at some point.
On the other hand, my walks were marked by vigilance: look for butterflies, because if you follow them you’ll find the ingredients for your meal. Look for eddies in the pond to stock up on fish. Watch for the blue birds with flared red tail feathers that serve as the game’s signposts. That is, you mark a destination on your map and instead of a glowing path in the interface, there are just… helpful birds that fly down at each fork in the road and point you in the direction you need to go. Bubbly.
Image: Wētā Workshop/Private Division
I spotted the odd visual error here and there—hobbits sitting next to benches instead of on them, a weird young man rolling around on his seated legs instead of walking—but Wētā has six months to iron out the bugs. Private Division and Wētā Workshop have pushed the game’s release window back from 2024 to March 25, 2025. “Ha ha, NERDS,” I giggled nerdily when I read that, because I happen to know off the top of my head that March 25 is the day on the Shire calendar that the One Ring was thrown into Mount Doom and destroyed.
As Gandalf once said of hobbits, “You can learn all about their ways in a month, and yet they can still surprise you in an emergency after a hundred years.” Given that Wētā seems to understand the premise of the cozy hobbit life simulation so well, I expect there’s a lot more to discover here.
Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game will be released on March 25, 2025 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox Series X and Netflix Games.
