SGF 2024: Tales of the Shire Hands-On Preview - Getting Cozy In Middle-earth

mmorpg.com:

The Shire has always been a place associated with lush gardens, beautifully decorated houses tucked away in little hills, and delicious food. Developer Weta Workshop looks to bring this lovely little place in Middle-earth to life in Tales of the Shire, and with each trailer or subsequent screenshot, it looks like they’ve nailed it. MMORPG had the opportunity to get their hands on this colorful, cozy game at Summer Game Fest. And I can say that it checked all of the boxes in what I’m looking for when it comes to your casual life and farming sim.

Tales of the Shire is a game focused on the idea of community and fostering relationships through food — which the title gamifies, as deepening those relationships with the various inhabitants and citizens of the Shire is dependent on cooking and sharing meals. While there are similarities to popular life and farming simulators in Tales of the Shire, such as Singularity6’s Palia or Concerned Ape’s Stardew Valley, the game focuses on this aspect to make it one of the core mechanics of the game, going so far as to outshine other elements. Everything you do is in service to perfect dishes and cook for the community, bringing them together over sumptuous meals of stewed fish and rhubarb soup of varying textures and flavors.

However, Tales of the Shire does away with the notion of failure. You cannot “mess up” or botch a dish; you can only make something that may or may not suit the taste of whomever you’re cooking for. Dishes are decided by texture and other factors when cooking. For example, I ended up making a spicy version of a dish by chopping up vegetables too finely. This is indicated by how chunky an ingredient is while chopping and by a meter on the right-hand side of the screen to indicate just how fine an ingredient is being chopped.

There are also ways to make a dish of higher quality, but I never succeeded in that endeavor. Mostly because I was awful at guessing how much I needed to chop up vegetables, fish, or other