Stardew Valley brought the Japanese-style farming/life sim to the PC, and it certainly hit a chord with players who were missing a game like Harvest Moon on the platform. Animal Crossing: New Horizons released at just the right time to capture a very wide audience, some of whom had never thought about trying a game in the genre. The result of both of those success stories is cozy games making their way to every imaginable platform. One of those games, Tales of the Shire, has a license that few people may have thought about when it comes to this genre: The Lord of the Rings.

You start the game as a hobbit who decides to move to the village of Bywater, a short distance away from the more popular village of Hobbiton. You are asleep on a fallen log when you're awoken by a kindly old wizard who offers to take you to your destination aboard his cart. Once you arrive, you move into the home of a hobbit that has since passed, and your job is to get to know everyone and get settled into your new life.

As in many cozy games, you start off by crafting your character. The variety of options is decent. You have a good selection of hairstyles and color options, and you can choose from five different body types, but there's nothing for height, so you can't create the tallest or shortest hobbit. You can choose from a bunch of presets for your first name to sound authentic to the books, or you can type in whatever name you want. You can't do the same for the last name, though.

If you're familiar with cozy games, you know what to expect with the gameplay mechanics. You'll be engaged in a large fetch quest that teaches you about the different mechanics, from farming to fishing to cooking. Friendship plays a big part, as the main goal is to become friends with everyone, but don't expect to get into any romantic trysts with neighbors because that option isn't available. The game world is pretty big, but there are already some hints of world expansion with areas that are blocked off but look like they could be cleared out, given the right time and situation.

The preview build does a good job of showing off the elements of the cozy game that the developers have gotten right. The environment looks great, but that's amplified by the various moving elements. There's always some animal moving around somewhere, but none of them seem to run away from you. There are always people around the place, and you'll always see them talking, sometimes with one another. You'll also see text appear when they speak. There's a day-and-night cycle, and there are seasons, but it all goes by faster than real time because everyone else in the village adheres to a schedule, and you need to sleep.

The decoration system may take some getting used to, but it seems to be built with a gamepad in mind more so than a keyboard and mouse. You're still controlling a cursor and pointing at objects and floors and walls, but you'll move your character with the cursor staying at the center of the screen. It takes a while to get used to how the system works, despite it sounding simple on paper, but once you understand it, it isn't too difficult to use.

If Tales of the Shire would have one signature element to call its own, it would be the cooking system, which gets more involved compared to its peers. You still need to assemble ingredients to make your dish, but now there's a minigame element where you'll need to mash buttons and get the meter just right to achieve things like vegetable chunk sizes or overall texture of the dish. On top of that, you're mostly engaged in cooking for small get-togethers more than your own benefit, so you'll write letters to invite people and then set up the tables and seating arrangements while also seeing if your guests approve of your dishes. It is an interesting mechanic that the game focuses on, but we'll have to see how the full game manages the various tasks.

One of the more charming aspects of the game is the navigation system. You can still look at your map to determine your destination and put down markers for where you're headed, but you won't get on-screen arrows or trails to follow. Instead, the game tries for a more semi-natural approach by having birds land on signposts and bridges and then subtly using their beaks to point out where you need to go. This can be too subtle, as you'll often stop and position yourself and the camera at just the right angle to see which direction the beak is pointing, but at least it fits with the game's overall theme. The same can be said of the butterflies to a lesser degree, as they sometimes lead you to items that can be foraged, but there's often a highlight for those items.

As for the general presentation, the game does well in conveying a side of the books that rarely gets attention. The characters go for a more cartoon-like look instead of something more realistic, and that works in terms of giving them the charm needed for the genre. As mentioned earlier, the environments are bright and cheerful even at night, but you will need to tweak some settings to keep the frame rate high. Tales of the Shire seems to require hardware beyond most other cozy games. The music also does a great job in conveying the peacefulness of the Shire. The game features no voices, as is typical of most games like this, but the effects to convey your character's mood and reactions go a long way toward adding charm to the game — better than traditional voice acting would.

Despite the awkward name, Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game shows some promise if you're a fan of cozy life sims. It has all of the expected features and adds some involved elements of its own, like the cooking mechanic. It'll take much more time to dig into the game and see how it fares alongside other cozy titles, but so far, it shows enough promise that fans should keep an eye out for it in the coming months.