Few things in existing fiction personify the modern cozy genre quite like Tolkien's iconic Hobbits. A fantasy species built around keeping a clean home, warm community, and a good meal, Hobbits are coziness incarnate. Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game is, despite its awkward mouthful of a title, starting from a strong position. Unfortunately while the recipe may be delicious in theory, the end result comes out more than a little undercooked.

Tales of the Shire takes place in the years between the events of The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings. While the game opens with a brief encounter with Gandalf, Tolkien fans will spot other things here and there that reference back to the books. You play as your own custom hobbit who has freshly arrived in the small settlement of Bywater. After briefly settling into a recently vacated hobbit hole you’ll quickly become caught up in the local effort to get Bywater formally recognized as an official village of Hobbiton. To do this you’ll engage in quests for different hobbits that generally amount to running around Bywater talking to highlighted characters until inevitably someone asks you to cook something for them. Bywater isn’t huge but it is quite labyrinthian and you’ll be going back and forth across it constantly. That being said, I did generally remain compelled to finish a quest once started, as the writing is overall quite charming.

A huge focus of Tales of the Shire is in its cooking mechanics. From growing things in your garden to foraging for wild plants, it all comes back to cooking. I actually really like this as the focus for a game about hobbits. It does mean however that general gameplay variety is somewhat limited. Every questline will eventually funnel into inviting specific characters over for a meal, making something that aligns with their tastes, and then watching the same cutscene play out as they react excitedly to their food. There is nothing wrong with the mechanic, it just doesn’t have enough depth to carry the game the way it needs to. The whole game suffers from this general lack of depth, as there just isn’t much to it. While you’ll be cooking a lot, your character doesn’t actually ever get hungry which is distinctly un-hobbit-like. On the other hand, even for a theoretically laid back genre, you can make the argument that Tales of the Shire is among the most laid back games of its kind. Nothing ever goes wrong or asks particularly much of the player.

The game operates on a day system, similar to plenty of other farming life sims. You’ll have a certain amount of time each day to cook, farm, fish, forage, shop, and talk to other characters. Each of these characters have their own schedule and several of them run shops that are open during certain parts of the day. Once it is late enough you’ll be able to go to bed. If you stay up too late, you’ll wake up a little later the next day, but there is no other real punishment for doing so. I did find, especially early on, that I would often run out of things to do before the day was over and couldn’t find any way to fast forward. So I’d wind up aimlessly fishing just waiting for the day to end.

While Tales of the Shire is releasing for the Nintendo Switch, it is of course also compatible with the Switch 2. I played fairly equally across both Switch 1 and 2. Image quality holds up reasonably on both platforms, though the graphics themselves I don’t find particularly appealing. The world itself looks fine, if uninspired, but there is something quite offputting about the designs of the hobbit characters. Though they do get credit for having a fully bearded dwarf woman. Frame rate has some real issues on Switch 1 and surprisingly the Switch 2 doesn’t completely iron them out. They appear to be tied to asset streaming, as running across the world incurs regular prolonged dips on Switch 1. On Switch 2 these are less aggressive though still noticeable as a brief lurch. I did also encounter one bug while playing on Switch 2 in which the entire sky became red for a few minutes. I wasn’t able to recreate this bug on Switch 1 so it's possible this is a compatibility issue, but I can’t be sure. But the biggest issue here comes in stability. On average I’d say Tales of the Shire crashed every 20 minutes or so. The crashes happened equally between both the Switch 1 and Switch 2, to the point that I started manually saving before and after any significant action. I was constantly battling not to lose progress and in multiple instances I put the game down for the night after a crash set me back to the start of a quest.

Tales of the Shire is a really solid idea. It should work. There are great ideas here and some solid writing. This feels like the early access version of what could eventually be a very good game. But right now, it isn’t. Instead it is a shallow glimpse at what could be. When you factor in significant performance issues that even the Switch 2 can’t seem to brute force, and constant stability problems, it becomes very hard to recommend this game. I really want to like Tales of the Shire. I think there is a reality in which it could potentially get better in time, but it just isn’t there yet.