The so-called cozy genre has exploded in popularity throughout the last decade, and the upcoming Tales of the Shire is expected to further expand it. The Lord of the Rings spin-off purports to hone in on the magical and quaint elements of Tolkien’s fantasy landscape, centering on the laidback and unflappable Hobbits.
There’s a lot of promise in this concept, which is exactly what the cozy genre needs; cozy games have gotten stale in recent years, with Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing clones being a dime a dozen these days. Even though many of these games, both big and small, are well-tuned, fun, and passionately crafted, the genre can often feel rather samey, focusing on the same tropes and design trends. One Tales of the Shire mechanic that has garnered a good bit of attention online is cooking: players can gather ingredients and create dishes based on the preferences of various NPCs, inviting them over for dinner to further their relationship, which would presumably come with benefits. It’s a cute and thematically relevant way to make players engage with the game’s crafting and resource-gathering systems, but as always, the devil will be in the details.
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Why Tales of the Shire’s Cooking Systems Could Be Influential
Tales of the Shire’s Cooking Promises To Be Engaging and Immersive
Featuring cooking in a game about Hobbits makes a lot of sense: the fantasy race is known to be particularly fond of eating, cooking, and bonding over a spread of home-cooked dishes. As such, Tales of the Shire will include a dedicated, multistep minigame for cooking, and making certain decisions during these minigames will impact the quality of the relevant dishes. For instance, the longer that a player spends chopping a piece of produce could impact how smooth or chunky a given dish turns out to be.
This level of interactivity is a good sign, especially since cooking in most cozy games boils down to selecting the appropriate ingredients and hitting a “cook” button, but the system’s success will depend on more than just these minigames. Plainly put, Tales of the Shire‘s cooking and meal-sharing framework ought to be holistic and reactive, while also encouraging players to engage with the game world organically. This appears to be the case, as some recipes will call for vague ingredients like “something bitter,” requiring players to actually study the plant life of the in-game world, familiarizing themselves with it for the best possible outcome.
The preferences of NPCs should also play a big role in this system, leading to more than just a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down reaction to player-prepared dishes. Ideally, the player’s work—their successes and failures with respect to a given dish—will be recognized and interpreted by Tales of the Shire‘s NPCs, leading to a nuanced and fruitful response in either a positive or negative direction. Depending on the particulars of how cooking impacts the social sim mechanics, Tales of the Shire could emerge as a genre leader.
Cooking Should Have Consequences in Tales of the Shire
Tales of the Shire will punish or reward players based on whether an NPC enjoys their food or not. For instance, if a character tells the player that they like sweet food, but the player makes a bitter dish, the NPC will react negatively. The extent to which this will impact the broader social simulation could be what makes or breaks the game’s cooking-centric features: will NPCs react mildly, or more colorfully? After all, food is sacrosanct in Hobbit culture, so it wouldn’t be surprising for characters to have a strong reaction to their gastronomic experiences. Perhaps different NPCs could return different degrees of rewards and consequences depending on their personality or other contextual elements, making for a multifaceted and weighty system.