Secret best Tolkien game Return To Moria gets Steam release with Steam Deck support and new sandbox mode

rockpapershotgun.com:

The dwarven engineers of The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria have formally entered the Golden Age of Steam. The game is now available on Valve's digital storefront, after a year in the comparatively barren underdark of the Epic Games Store, and developers Free Range Games have also released a Golden Update, which adds offline single player pausing, around 100 building objects, and a sandbox mode allowing for non-story-led excavation and settlement of the game's procedurally generated mountains. Plus, new hats and axes! Try not to get dragon sickness.

I haven't played Return To Moria since October last year. Back then, it was a comfortingly vast survival game with crunchy torch-lit aesthetics, many gorgeous biomes to uncover, and a fair amount of jank. (For the purposes of Immersion, please find on the right an image with a translation of "jank" into Khuzdûl, the ancient runic language of the Dwarves, care of Tengwar Transcriber.)

I'm definitely up for another crack at this particular seam of lore-digging, as long as they've fixed that thing where all your interior decorations end up at tortuous 45 degree angles to the layout. Here's an 11-minute talkthrough video from game director, detailing both what's in the Golden Update and what they've added since launching on EGS.

If you don't have time for a video, here's my own breakdown of the Golden Update. Let's start with the sandbox mode, which has already been available in beta on EGS. This lets you generate worlds from "a wide variety of random seeds, meaning each playthrough can vary significantly in layout and difficulty". There are "minimal tutorials" in sandbox, and as such, the devs recommend that you only play if you're familiar with the game's campaign or with other survival sims. Sandbox brings with it crafting recipes for 14 new kinds of weapon and armour. These include the Wolf Skin Hat and the Barôkamlut, or mithril battleaxe. You will probably find the Barôkamlut useful when seeking to acquire the