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A peaceful Middle-earth experience, 'Tales of the Shire'
A small, cute, peaceful, and beautiful place, 'Tales of the Shire' showcases the warm and ordinary daily life unfolding in the Shire, and has set up a demo booth at the Summer Game Fest Play Days to reveal new information.
Developed by Weta Workshop, Tales of the Shire is a life simulation game set in the riverside village of the Shire. Players become laid-back and leisurely hobbits in the peaceful riverside village, living a 'hobbit life' as it flows by.
The demo prepared for this Play Days was about 30 minutes long, and after the initial tutorial, players could freely enjoy various contents of the game such as fishing, cooking, and crafting.
The game is generally very peaceful and laid-back. However, it doesn't feel like there's nothing to do, or that it's too simple, or that it hides simplicity with leisure. Tales of the Shire incorporates unique and delicate aspects into the potentially predictable life simulation, highlighting its characteristics.
In particular, this element of delicacy is a rather ambiguous description, but there is no better word for Tales of the Shire. The game includes small characteristic aspects of a 'peaceful and beautiful riverside village' in game-like parts that are easy to overlook.
For example, there's the wayfinding. Instead of the typical methods chosen by most games, such as simply displaying guidance marks on the ground when you find and mark a destination on the map, or creating a compass mark above your head, Tales of the Shire uses 'birds'. When you select a destination, a beautiful bird looks in the direction you need to go, and another bird flies in, and if you follow the birds that fly in, you will arrive at your destination before you know it.
It's not just birds. If you follow the yellow butterflies, spices appear, and if you follow the blue butterflies, refreshing wild fruits appear. In this way, the game naturally connects various natural environments with the gameplay. Isn't it a beautiful guidance system, as beautiful as the scenery of the Shire?
There is another element that is really simple but makes people happy. It's running. Our lovely and small hobbits are very cute when they walk around normally, but they become even cuter when they take a running motion by pressing a key. Watching them run with a bouncy gait, as if you can hear humming from their backs, is so 'cute' that you can't help but smile.
The game has all the familiar elements seen in life simulations, such as cooking, fishing, gardening, crafting, and housing, while also including some unique features of Tales of the Shire. Rather than making every process complicated or changing it in a unique way, it keeps the base the same while adding special touches little by little, like a sweetener.
The most noticeable of these is cooking. The process of making dishes, such as obtaining ingredients, putting them in, slicing, and stir-frying, is common enough to be seen in other games of the same genre. However, by including flavors such as salty, spicy, and sweet in each ingredient, and by setting cooking methods that allow you to adjust the texture in the cooking process, you can draw the results of the dish as you want.
For example, if you put in more than 5 salty ingredients, a combo occurs and a very 'salty' dish is made, or if you put sweet ingredients in a spicy dish, the spiciness is neutralized. Also, the final product varies depending on how much you chop each ingredient and how long you stir-fry it. It's like they've created more special in-game content by utilizing things that are needed when cooking in real life, such as the taste of ingredients and cooking methods.
In addition to cooking, the game hides cute little touches here and there. When gardening, you can adjust everything from the shape of the pot to the position and rotation in great detail, and you can plant seeds of different sizes in the pots you have arranged to wait for harvest. Of course, you can also scoop out wrongly planted crops with a shovel.
It also supports basic housing systems such as bringing furniture into a small, cute house or changing the floors and ceilings, and of course you can also experience fishing, where you reel in and out directly in the sparkling stream.
Interaction with the various hobbit neighbors living in the Shire is also one of the fun elements of the game. If you treat a friend to a dish you worked hard to make, or struggle to help a neighbor in trouble, your affinity with them will increase, and you can receive cute and charming gifts such as cooking or furniture recipes.
In the process, you can naturally encounter stories intertwined with your neighbors, and you can even open and accept each of these stories one by one from the mailbox in front of your house. In addition to the story, individual quests linked to various systems could also be checked.
Tales of the Shire, where you can freely enjoy daily life in the peaceful and beautiful small village of the Shire's riverside village, is scheduled to be released on PC and consoles in 2024. And Korean, which is essential for a complete experience, is also officially supported.
웹진 인벤김수진 기자
2024-06-19