I Became a Simple Hobbit of the Quiet Countryside in Tales of the Shire
- Ellie
- Aug 6
- 6 min read
Disclaimer: I was provided with a key to check out this game ahead of launch.
Tales of the Shire is a Lord of the Rings life sim about living as a Hobbit in Bywater and everything you get up to in your new town. The main plot revolves around improving Bywater so that it can earn official village status and be recognised as a village by the wider Hobbiton community.
From the get go it’s very wholesome and has most of the typical farming sim activities like fishing, foraging and cooking, although it is missing mining and bug catching if you’re particularly partial to those.
“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It'll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they'll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields... and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?”
One of the best things is that there’s no stamina bar so you can do as much as you like every day and each day is around 30 to 40 minutes long. However, if you stay up until the very end of the day, there's no real warning to let you know when the day’s about to end so you need to keep an eye on the time keeper, but thankfully the punishment for fainting isn’t too harsh - you just wake up the next day in the Morning instead of at Dawn.
Another big benefit is that you can save whenever and wherever you want from the options menu, although one drawback is that you can’t sleep until evening or night time, which does mean you can’t easily skip ahead a few days if you want to for whatever reason.
Now I will say that I am playing on PC and can’t speak for the Switch version, but I’ve encountered very few bugs in the game. I’ve had two bugs that I’m aware of, which included turning in my vegetables early to Farmer Cotton even though I hadn’t grown any, and loading into my save to find myself beneath the world one day. But I simply quit out, reverified my files, and then when I loaded back in it had fixed and it only happened one time.
I played the game nonstop from start to finish and at 13 hours I’ve just finished the main storyline, which I really liked to be honest. There aren’t many farming games that have a main plotline to follow, and I liked that this one did and it was really well done. A lot of the quests at the beginning, especially the meet the villagers quest, are back and forth fetch quests, but I thought the story got really interesting towards the end and I was sad when it was over.
But there’s still lots to do in the game like level up my clubs to max and befriend everyone and I’m definitely going to be playing more, mainly because I want to see what Winter is like because Autumn was so pretty.
While we’re talking about the plot and storyline, I will add that this game doesn’t have voice acting. I’m used to farming games not having voice acting, so personally this isn’t a big issue for me, but there is a lot of talking in this one, so I can understand why people want it so much!
However I will say that while there’s a lot of talking during the quests, the NPC interaction outside of quests is quite limited. Unlike other farming games you can’t talk to the NPC‘s whenever you want as they only have dialogue for the quests and even when you invite them over for dinner, they don’t really have anything to say.
There’s also these random NPCs who just kind of stand around all day. Some of them have dialogue but you can’t talk to them and they’re kind of redundant. There are these additional tales that you can come across to learn more about the world around you and the characters in it, which do provide a little extra interaction. But they’re not recorded anywhere and you just have to look out for the glittery blue sparkles as you run around.
One thing I do like about the NPCs is that they give you gifts when you reach the next friendship level like recipes or furniture. This is super helpful because the more recipes you have, the easier it is to cook for everyone and the furniture that you unlock through the friend upgrades is much nicer than the furniture you can buy in the shop. Like seriously, why does Fosco only sell cups and cutlery?
Plus when you reach a milestone level they’ll give you an upgrade. For example, Willow will unlock a room in your house and Farmer Cotton will give you a chicken.
They also have a tracking system so that you can find the NPCs whenever you need them. The first way they do this is by adding the NPC to the map once you’ve met them for the first time. And the second way is the birds. I find the birds are kind of like marmite - you either love them or you hate them and I’m definitely the latter.
Essentially it was a fun whimsical thing they added to the game where instead of having a mini map or following quest markers to find where you’re going, you have these blue birds to lead you. They fly in and out to point you in the right direction, but the issue is that they’re very easy to miss. Oh and they don’t go inside the buildings.
I found them really hard to keep track of, and I just stopped using them after a while.
I feel like I’ve been talking about this game for so long, but there’s still so many points. I want to talk about it so I’m going to run through the last ones really quickly.
The backpack space is very limited and you can’t upgrade it until later in the game after you’ve unlocked the foraging club quests which means you’re stuck with 10 spaces for a lot of the early game. This issue was made worse by the fact that your fish don’t stack and other items only stack groups of nine and there are multiple rarity levels which don’t stack together either.
But to combat that there is a ton of space in your pantry - I think 500 spaces.
The fishing mini game is quite easy as you just need to pull in the opposite direction of the fish. The cooking mini game is fun too, although it can be a bit frustrating in the early game when you can’t reach the star because you don’t have all the equipment.
When it comes to cooking, you’ll need lots of plants to grow fruit and veg to make your meals. But rather than tilling the ground in this game, you’re planting everything into planters. This does cause a few issues with space, especially as planters are really expensive to buy and you can’t buy any vegetables in town.
But they do have a cool plant neighbour system, where if you grow plants that like each other in the same planter then they’ll grow at a higher quality. And your plants don’t die at the end of the season, instead they’ll continue growing at a slower speed.
Speaking of seasons, the seasons are a lot shorter in Tales of the Shire with only 13 days per season. Plus, you start in Summer.
There are also some weird sound mixing things going on, where sometimes the music won’t play or you’ll ring a bell for a shop and there won’t be a sound or there’s no cutlery noises when eating a meal. It’s not a huge deal but it is a bit off-putting.
And finally, there’s no running. While I love skipping around as a hobbit, I’m not sure it’s actually any faster than walking and this map is big, so I would love to be able to run around it. Especially when I have to go back-and-forth so many times from my pantry because my inventory is constantly getting filled up.
Overall there are a lot of things I liked and didn’t like about this game, and if you’re looking for an exceptional game that’s doing something new and exciting you’re looking in the wrong place. But I’ve played over 20 hours at this point and I’ve been having fun and I’m going to keep playing to see winter.
Having said that though, I would definitely say that this game isn’t for everyone. I personally think that Fae Farm is a good comparison, so if you liked Fae Farm you’ll probably like this one too and vice versa.
If you're still on the fence, you can check out my full overview of the first season in game, where I share more of my thoughts 👇
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