We live in the midst of a lot of Middle-earth media. Last year's miserable Gollum game, the apparent Gollum duology of 2026, The rings of powerThe elven kings, War of the Rohirrim's Horse Maidens, and more video games of varying scope and theme, are reportedly still on the way.
And yet, none of the above gives me what I really want to see in a Tolkien adaptation: something with a completely different aesthetic and tone than Peter Jackson's 2001 film trilogy. Middle-earth contains more people than could fit into those three films, and it's a shame that the setting has been pigeonholed by its success.
But this week I had the chance to sit down with the best fresh take I've ever seen on a Lord of the Rings adaptation: Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game. ToTS is the inaugural project from Rings veteran game studio Wētā Workshop, made in partnership with Private Division, and from what I've been able to play of this highly anticipated “comfortable hobbit life” sim, the studio has a winner on its hands.
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 Polygon was able to play this week covered Tales of the ShireThe opening day/night cycles of The Legend of Zelda: The Rise of the Sky place the player in the role of a hobbit who has recently arrived in the village of Bywater, which is a few days' walk from both Hobbiton (home of Bilbo and Frodo) and the human town of Bree (home of the Prancing Pony Inn).
My three hours with Tales of the Shire I played them on PC, though I also experimented a bit by streaming them to my Steam Deck, where the controls were even more intuitive than with keyboard and mouse. After firing up the demo on Steam, I opened the achievement list for some fun. Right at the top was one for having at least three vests.
I took this as an immediate good omen.
Image: Wētā Workshop/Private Division
After a quick opening cutscene, I was presented with a delightfully robust character creator, with an unexpectedly genre-avant-garde five-point slider (at one end, waists were tiny and cleavage was noticeable, and at the other, the opposite), as well as the utterly unique option to customize the hair on my character's feet.
Players can type in their own first and last names, but they also have the option to choose from two extensive lists of names that seem to be lifted straight from hobbits mentioned in Tolkien’s work. That is to say: I didn’t check every name in the books, but I was able to scroll through the list and christen my hobbit with the exact canonical name I was looking for: that of one of Bilbo’s uncles, Polo Baggins. This wasn’t just another good omen, it was a princely gift.
Tales of the Shire gives a clear and immediate insight into the duality of Tolkien's hobbits: they have a great capacity for being loyal, frank, brave, and resilient, made all the more striking by their more observable capacity for being petty, conservative, and frivolous. One of the first things you learn from Orlo Proudfoot, the hobbit who welcomes you to Bywater, is that while big folk settle their differences with swords and arrows, hobbits do so by inviting people to dinner at home. The comparison of the first reference to ToTS'The very relaxed cooking and battle meal mechanics gave it a passive-aggressive framework that instantly felt of a piece with Tolkien's hobbits.
Case in point: I laughed out loud when I realized that my first extended mission was to help a down-to-earth farmer win an argument with the snobby miller over a completely immaterial local minutiae. About GodFarmer Cotton and I were going to rub it in Miller Sandyman's face. His son is a cowardly collaborator anyway.
But to add insult to injury, even though you didn't know her, you inherit your house from a beloved old hobbit woman who recently passed away, and in one of your first quests you invite two of her former students over for a meal to give them fresh, happy memories in a place that was recently filled with sadness. Bywater has a nice sense of history, told piece by piece in fragmented conversations, and the game wants you to think about how you fit into it.
Image: Wētā Workshop/Private Division
When preparing the dishes for that meal, it was already apparent that this was going to be a satisfying cycle. Invite your guests, wake up on the day of the event, check out what they're craving on the in-game menu, choose your recipes, and gather your ingredients (options available in the demo included fishing, foraging, and gardening). Your pantry, by the way, visually fills up with the specific foods you put in it. If you store a tomato, the tomato basket fills up. If you store some mustard, the spot on the table where the mustard goes will have mustard on it. It's incredibly charming.
Then you cook: your choice of ingredients will set stats like Flavors and Deliciousness, but the cooking minigame lets you tweak them to get the ideal texture, using whatever tools you have available in your kitchen (in this demo, just the cutting board and frying pan). Then you welcome your guests, place the 3D objects of your finished dishes on the table, and rack up the rewards of “Companionship” points, gifts, and story progress.
The few days I spent playing the demo were enough to get me tantalizingly close to achieving my first major plot objective (organizing enough lunches with my neighbors to be accepted as a Bywater “local”), but I didn’t manage it. And, reader, I regret it. I sent out lunch invitations and now I can’t keep them.
I'd say I spent most of my time in the game looking for NPCs to talk to rather than purposefully gathering ingredients, repairing or decorating my somewhat ramshackle house, or cooking; there were plenty of tutorial quests to complete. And while the setting is extremely Lovely, I could see all that walking eventually getting a bit repetitive.
But on the other hand, my walks were marked by attentiveness: keep an eye out for butterflies, because if you follow them you'll find ingredients for food. Watch the pond for swirls in the water to stock up on fish. Watch the blue birds with the red tail feathers that serve as the game's wayfinding system. That is, you mark a destination on your map, and instead of a glowing path in the UI, there are just… helpful birds that fly around at every crossroads and point you in the right direction. Effervescent.
Image: Wētā Workshop/Private Division
I did encounter the odd visual glitch here and there (hobbits sitting next to benches instead of on them, a strange young man moving around on his sitting legs instead of walking), but Wētā has six months to fix the issues. Private Division and Wētā Workshop updated the game’s release window from 2024 to a date of March 25, 2025. “Ha ha, NERDS,” I nerdily chuckled when I read that, because I know by heart that March 25 is the day, according to the Shire Calendar, that the One Ring was thrown into Mount Doom and destroyed.
As Gandalf once said of hobbits, “You can learn all there is to know about their ways in a month, and yet after a hundred years they can still surprise you in a pinch.” With the skill with which Wētā seems to understand the cozy summary of hobbit life, I imagine there will be much 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.