The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria still has fathoms to go

polygon.com:

The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria treads a very familiar gameplay loop in a world that isn’t quite fit for purpose. The premise is one that should fill any Lord of the Rings fan with feelings of excitement and wonder: being able to explore Moria to your heart’s content is almost unheard of in video games, with the exception being the Mines of Moria expansion for The Lord of the Rings Online. But Return to Moria is an open-world survival game shoehorned into a linear environment. Its mechanics constantly battle against one another and frustrate more than they entertain.

Taking place after the events of the main trilogy during the Fourth Age of Middle-earth, Lord Gimli — voiced once again by John Rhys-Davies — has summoned all the dwarves to Moria in an attempt to reclaim it from goblins, orcs, cave trolls, and plenty of other foes who have set up shop in the once magnificent kingdom of Khazad-dûm. Return to Moria begins with you stranded over 200 fathoms deep after the floor gives way beneath you, separating you from the mining company.

Your one core objective, above all else, is to find your way back to your fellow dwarves. To do so, you must explore, and ultimately conquer, the entirety of the famous underground labyrinth, which is laden with all manner of enemies. Plenty of the usual survival game tropes are here, from starting with weak tools and weapons and gradually upgrading them as you find rarer materials and build more capable machines, to hunger and weariness meters that limit the amount you’re capable of doing in a set period.

This is why it’s all the more baffling that the world you’re able to explore is so restrictive. Take Valheim, for example, the most similar comparison in the genre. Certain biomes