Tales of the Shire is very serious about second breakfast

This story is part of our Summer Gaming Marathon series.

There have been plenty of Lord of the Rings video games created over the past two decades. Many of those focus on epic fantasy action, retelling the story of the original trilogy or at least playing around in its surrounding events (with mixed results). While that makes for a fun literary fantasy come to life, the franchise has always left a market untapped. Fighting is fun, but what about players who simply want to live out a quiet hobbit life?

Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game is set to deliver that fantasy. Rather than focusing on bloody battles against orcs, it’s a cozy life sim that lets players enjoy a leisurely life in a hobbit hole. It’s a dream come true in its own right. I got to see a bit of how that works at Summer Game Fest, where I tried out a sunny, 30-minute demo. While it didn’t give me a full sense of its life simulator elements, I at least learned one important thing:Tales of the Shire is as serious about cooking as its hobbits are.

The demo I played was exclusively built around its cooking systems, which was a bit of an odd choice for a first playable slice. When I jumped in, I got a brief introduction to my hobbit hero and their cozy home, which looked like it was plucked right out of one of the movies. What I come to learn is that I’m an inhabitant of a small hobbit town that’s yet to be fully recognized as part of Hobbiton. I’ll need to help build up the town to get it there. I didn’t get to poke around too long, though; I had cooking to do.

I was thrown into my kitchen and given a little tutorial on meals.Tales of the Shire goes the minigame route here, asking me to mash buttons to cut ingredients or scoop them into bowls with my joystick. The complexity comes when I need to craft dishes with specific flavors. At the bottom right of my screen, I see a square grid with four quadrants. That lets me know what my meal’s flavor is as I cook, and I want to land in a specific spot