Hello and welcome back to Alice’s Thing of the Month.
This month we are going to be talking about Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game.
I’m a huge fan of gaming and have wanted to play this game ever since it was advertised. I finally bought it in the Black Friday sales and have been playing it ever since. Tales of the Shire was released on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5 on 29th July 2025. The game is set in the period between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, set around 59 years before Frodo inherits the One Ring. This setting allows us to experience The Shire before all the doom and gloom over shadows it.
At the beginning of the game you get to create your own hobbit, their name and the way they dress which is a fun opening. It is a super cosy game where you learn to fish, garden, cook, make friends with other hobbits, have meals with them and complete quests to progress the story. This game is a breath of fresh air in the world of stressful, complex games like RPGS. There is no pressure in this game and you can take all the time in the world and do the main story at your own pace, this is how I imagine actual hobbits would live.
The game is developed by Weta Workshop Game Studio, a division of the legendary creative studio that brought the visual world of Middle Earth to life for the Peter Jackson films, so they really had an authentic understanding of the source materials and how the world should look and it really is perfect. The game unfortunately got quite a lot of bad reviews when it was first released, more so because of how the game looked. These days people want to see everything in 4K and to have absolutely amazing graphics. I find the cartoon style charming and perfectly suited to the game’s light-hearted tone, proving that great graphics aren’t always about realism.
If you’re a fan of gaming and The Lord of the Rings films, I really recommend playing the game it really stays true to Tolkien’s world and has a beautiful relaxing soundtrack.
Thanks for reading.
