Cosy life sim Tales Of The Shire needs more time in the oven, delayed until 2025

Image credit: Take-Two Interactive

Tales Of The Shire: A The Lord Of The Rings Game has been delayed into early 2025. The cosy life sim set in the home of the hobbits had initially been aiming for a late 2024 release, but developers Weta Workshop Game Studio announced they need more time.

"All of us here at Weta Workshop are excited to have you join us in the Shire, a peaceful corner of J.R.R. Tolkien's world. When a new Hobbit steps into Bywater for the very first time, we want that moment to be everything you're hoping for," reads the announcement shared via X.

"To ensure we deliver that vision, Tales Of The Shire will now be launching early 2025."

A Tales Of The Shire showcase stream will show more of the game in action on September 22nd, broadcast on YouTube and Twitch.

Edwin already had the chance to play Tales Of The Shire at Summer Game Fest back in June, where he found it so relentlessly winsome as to be uncanny.

"Playing Tales Of The Shire at Summer Game Fest has reminded me that the point of the Shire is to be a departed paradise, perpetually eroded by dire events in the East, insert World War-era colonial subtext here. It’s Tolkien’s Green Hill Zone, a gust of sunshine before the plunge into Moria and Mordor. Take away the plunge, and the gust of sunshine grows sinister – intriguingly so, like a hearty overture that’s always threatening to switch to a minor key. I don’t mean any of the above as criticism. This seems as fine and diverting and inconsequential a cosy life sim as any – hardly inventive as a collection of minigames and cottagecore DIY linked by dialogue and some very gentle exploration, but with LOTR fittings to tempt you away from the likes of, say, Dave The Diver. What captivates me about it, though, is what it isn’t, and how it relentlessly thwarts my instinctive sense that everything is about to go to hell. As Sylvia Plath wrote, the flowers are too vivid, too excitable. The air is too balmy."

What a treasure Edwin is. I'm a simpler mind and therefore disturbed solely by the game having the subtitle, "A The Lord Of The Rings Game". There should be a the price to pay for mixing definite and indefinite articles like that.