Why It Took 20 Years For Lord of the Rings To Finally Make A Cozy Game
In a hole in the ground...
You wouldn’t know it from today’s biggest films or video games or TV shows depicting this universe, but J.R.R. Tolkien wasn’t all that into the battles or violence. He spent more time describing meals in The Hobbit and the goings on of Tom Bombadil and the Old Forest in Lord of the Rings than he did for the biggest clashes (Helms Deep, the 22-minute climax of The Two Towers was but 26 pages long). And yet it’s the focus of Shadow of Mordor, Battle of Middle Earth, and all of Peter Jackson’s films.
Video games have certainly always had a penchant for violence, but the Lord of the Rings, in particular, is a vibrant universe fit to burst with creatures, culture, and coziness. Who wouldn’t want to see how the elves live in Mirkwood, help dwarves craft magnificent structures in Moria, or live the quiet life as a hobbit in The Shire? A prime opportunity was lost in the heyday of the series, as adaptations sought to follow trends and double down on gritty ultra-violence, when many players just wanted to simply exist in Middle-earth. And it’s baffling that those aspects of Lord of the Rings have largely stayed unexplored until now, with the hobbit-sized game Tales of the Shire.
“Set in the Third Age, this quiet corner of Middle-earth was a beautiful opportunity for us to explore The Shire beyond Bag’s End in a way that felt authentic and true to J.R.R. Tolkien’s vision,” Steve Lambert, head artist at Weta Workshop, tells Inverse. “For us, that meant crafting a place for people to truly enjoy hobbits’ simple pleasures and labors of love: their homes and their gardens, their shared meals and their friendships. In short, making the kind of place that felt like home.”
In Tales of the Shire, you create your very own hobbit, claim your hobbit hole, and then just live a quaint little life. You’re able to explore Bywater and the surrounding area, cook meals to share with other residents, and see the stories of the settlement play out as you deepen relationships.
It’s not hard to see why The Shire would be a prime setting for the game genre popularized by titles like Animal Crossing. Even if you’ve just watched the films, you know the hobbit holes are quaint and cozy — places to hold great feasts, or while away the evening hours with a good book. Those factors are exactly why people have come to love cozy games so much — it plays into the general sense of escapism that video games provide. With the stressors of modern life, which continue to get worse, being able to jump into a fantasy world and just live an alternate life there is undeniably attractive. And in Lambert’s mind, that’s the most essential ingredient of a cozy game.
Tales of Shire lets you define your own hobbit hole and see how the idyllic conclave changes with the seasons.
“The most important aspect is the freedom to play at your own pace. Tales of the Shire is low stakes and all about creating a sense of warmth and relaxation. If you want to just walk around and explore the landscape, you can do that. If you want to cozy up in your hobbit hole and decorate all day, you can do that too,” Lambert says, “The cozy game ethos is perfectly matched with the hobbit way of life. They don’t long for adventure; they cherish community, nature, and the simple pleasures of food, friends, and fellowship.”
Building off of that, the team at Weta put a copious amount of thought into some of the specific mechanics of the game — namely the cooking. One of the game’s developers was a former chef who helped whip up recipes that you’d be able to replicate in real life. But Lambert notes they wanted to emphasize players needing to tailor the dishes to each guest, figuring out if they “like their soup smooth or chunky.”
He adds, “This then ties into the gathering and exploration — completing more quests and finding more locations gives you more ingredients to play around with.”
Of course, the rope needed to tie all these gameplay elements together is a strong overall visual aesthetic, creating a sense of place. Despite the fantasy setting, however, cozy games often need things to be grounded to some degree. First and foremost, it’s absolutely vital that the look and feel of The Shire is right before anything else can follow. With that in mind, the Tales of the Shire team took liberal inspiration from real-life artists to craft this new Lord of the Rings world. Lambert says that a key inspiration were the brushstrokes and texture featured in the works of John Singer Sargent, a renowned portrait artist who rose to fame around the turn of the 20th century. This created a painterly-esque aesthetic that hadn’t really been seen in Lord of the Rings games before now, but the idea of finding inspiration even extended to the game’s minutiae.
The game’s art style gives a never-before-seen cozy vibe to not just The Shire, but a lot of your favorite Lord of the Rings characters.
“Moving indoors to the hobbit holes, knickknacks, and clothing you see in the game, we really embraced the aesthetic of the Arts and Crafts Movement of the time, celebrating decoration, craftsmanship and simplicity,” Lambert says. “Think of makers like William Morris, who was renowned for textiles and tiles, and Gustav Stickley, who had a distinctly crafted style with his furniture. We wanted to evoke that sense of comfort you feel from a beautiful hand-crafted rug in the art style, so that players can really relax into the game.”
It’s almost funny how different the focus of a game like Tales of the Shire is from something like Shadow of Mordor, which is laser-focused on brutality and accentuating the gritty violence of Middle-earth — but ironically, from a big picture standpoint, both games are about getting the “feel” of Lord of the Rings right, Tales of the Shire just does it from the opposite standpoint from the dozens of other games in the series. Instead of massive battles and 10 bosses, Tales of the Shire wants player to go at their own pace and build a peaceful life.
And therein lies the great shame of how The Lord of the Rings games have vastly overlooked an essential ingredient of the source material. If you’ve read any of Tolkien’s books, you know the author absolutely reveled in deep, lengthy descriptions of meals, history, nature, and more. A meal at the inn often has as many pages as a big battle — but despite that, video games have chosen to hone in solely on those epic battles. That goes hand in hand with the penchant video games have always had for violence.
Tales of the Shire’s cooking minigame is realized with painstaking detail, especially in the wide array of ingredients you’ll need to grow and gather.
But it feels like the tides are changing, both for video games at large and The Lord of the Rings specifically. To its credit, The Lord of the Rings Online for 18 years has given players the chance to exist in a massive version of Middle-earth, and it continues to cultivate a dedicated fanbase. Return to Moria is a Minecraft-esque crafting game set in the halls of Dwarven lords. And, of course, Tales of the Shire goes full-force into the warm hug of coziness.
Alone, any one of these games is just a drop in the bucket — but together, slowly but surely, they’re forging the way for truly realizing the potential of the most influential fantasy series ever created. And Lambert, fittingly, illustrates that by talking about how the very creation of The Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien’s place in history, was vital to the game itself.
“No work was a greater inspiration than Tolkien’s books,” Lambert says. “We considered the time and place he was alive, imagining how the Yorkshire countryside would have looked, and creating a landscape that would evoke the rural English countryside of the author’s time.”
