The preview follows your created character leaving their hometown of Bree to start a life of their own in one of The Shire’s quaintest villages, Bywater. When you get there, however, your first series of quests involves proving that Bywater actually
is a village, as a local curmudgeon implies the village is more “Backwater” than Bywater.
This storyline serves as a sort of tutorial for the game, as it introduces you to some of your neighbors and the game’s core features: fishing, cooking, gardening, foraging, and nurturing relationships. Many of these features really worked for me. The game’s fishing mechanic, while not novel, is a fun, tension-based mini-game that avoids being annoying or grueling. Despite not being someone especially fond of in-game cooking or crafting–generally I do those things out of necessity–I actually found myself wanting to spend a significant amount of time in my kitchen. Rather than just hitting a few buttons to make a meal, you are encouraged to chop and cook your ingredients to create a more textured dish.
This ties in with gardening and foraging, as high-quality ingredients, spices, and herbs help elevate the meal’s overall flavor. I adored mindlessly wandering through the woods, picking up hops, puffball mushrooms, and currants. Another system I really enjoyed in Tales of the Shire is Companion Crops, which gives certain crops bonuses if they are grown next to a crop it gets along with. Conversely, there are some crops that should be kept in different beds, lest their quality decline….
However, the “nurturing relationships” aspect is a different story. Though one of the ways you can improve your relationships–inviting your neighbors over for a dinner party that will satiate their cravings–is fun, that is unfortunately about the extent of what I enjoyed. While I liked the game’s writing overall, many of the town’s villagers felt same-y to me, each offering the same cheeky banter and, more gratingly, frustrating fetch quests. So much of my time in the village was spent going back and forth between a select few hobbits, with a particularly egregious quest seeing me going back and forth between the same two hobbits upwards of four times….
And while the overall environment is lovely and evocative of The Shire we know and love–quaint, comforting, and verdant–I found myself continuously irked by the game’s quirks. Bywater is filled with hobbits, a clear effort to make the town feel lived-in that I understand completely. But it quickly grew frustrating when I was trying to walk around and meet my neighbors and just about every hobbit I bumped into was an NPC whom I could not interact with. Despite being filled with people, it began to feel a bit scarce….
In lieu of a traditional mini-map, compass, or some other form of “breadcrumb trail” to follow, Tales of the Shire chooses to immerse players by having them follow blue birds that will perch themselves atop fence posts and signs every so often. While cute in theory, it would often get a bit frustrating when I was going faster than the birds would appear, or when I was traversing through a denser area–such as the town square or woods–and would simply lose track of them. Considering Bywater is so deeply embedded in nature and filled with small bridges, winding roads, and only a couple handfuls of NPCs you can interact with, scattered about the map, not being able to fully rely on the birds was frustrating….
Between the fetch quests, my growing frustrations with certain features, and the lack of compelling characters or plot points, I eventually found myself not particularly interested in leaving my little hobbit-hole. However, unlike a game like Stardew Valley in which being fairly reclusive and focusing on creating your own little slice of paradise is viable, Tales of the Shire seems reliant upon you interacting with your neighbors. Partly because you’d be hard pressed to actually fill your entire day doing all the truly fun things, even if you do decide to spend a chunk of time giving your home a fun little makeover….
