The Story of Charles: The Lord of the Rings Game Review
Blog Andrew Joseph 29 Jul , 2025 0
The most destructive part about the Charles story: the master of the Lord of the Rings game, which is just a short time in the premise of achieving such a crazy one. I mean, which Tolkien nerd among us is not daydreaming about living a relaxed life? But it took me 25 hours and instead felt like I was walking through this mortal swamp of misfortune that I had experienced, not warmth and comfort. Sadly, it was dull from beginning to end and running so badly that I wouldn't even allow peace to be bored. Baremone Life Sims mechanics offers some of the shallowest classic activities like fishing and farming, do better in dozens of other games, and socially connecting with Bywater residents is monotonous, repetitive, and never worth the effort. At least there are some humorous writing and fun moments here and there, and, as the main progressive activity, the cooking mini game is slightly more depth than the other chores you do, but actually one of the most disappointing comfort games I've played since the second year has drowned out the existing highlights. I got into the story of Charles and thought I would be as happy as Denelor saw Boromir, but I got Faramir.
Although it rarely succeeds in its attempts, The Story of the Shire follows mainly the blueprints of games like Animal Crossing and Disney Dream Valley, in a quiet village, as a life activity for the main painting. As you improve your relationship with people in fellow towns, you'll try out the smaller version of the usual fishing, gardening and cooking mini-games – all wrapped around Tolkien's skin and played with characters and locations found in Lord of the Rings. This minimalist story gets you into the furry feet of a hobbit who recently moved to Baishui and began building himself in the community while pinning the failed hobbit hole you gave. You will come across some recognizable characters like Gandalf and Rosie Cotton and offer your neighbors the same errands to try to formally recognize sidewater as a village. Games like this are usually a story, but there are some creepy characters and fun moments here and there, as the stupid actors of the Hobbit are quarreling and quarrel over trivial things that only the Hobbit will bother. Unfortunately, the complete lack of sound performance suppresses this high point. With the run time of about 15 hours throughout the story, so colorful and well-known characters remain completely silent will never feel it.
One of the great things about the life type is that while they may seem shallow at first, the longer you play, the more you find that the hidden layers of depth are completely lost. Unfortunately, Tales lacks this basic component. When I usually want to build a quiet, virtual life for myself, I usually want to get into a series of easy-going activities that are impossible to do, but instead make me scratch my head because they even wear the meaning of all the monotonous busy work that I have bothered. This is mainly because, despite a lot of cooking, the vast majority of the mechanisms on the bones of the story are seldom meat, such as the best way to make money is to walk slowly on a very small map and can sell the same small amount of visible items and then sell them so that you can buy bacon in the cooking. The only time when any changes happen is that when the seasons change every dozen or so in the game, you get some new ingredients to find the crops you grow, but there are a lot of annoying grinding between these transitions, which will eventually only change the ingredients you collect and the look of the village.
From fishing to gardening, almost every activity suffers from the same outrageous depth. For example, you can only fish in a few spots around the map, and doing so will produce the same tiny fish that hardly increases or develops over time. When I unlocked my first fishing rod upgrade after completing many fishing-based tasks, I hope this would expand the number of fishing holes I could access or let me catch a brand new roster of marine creatures, but only a moment later those hopes were dashed as I went back to the same place and caught the same fish I had been with me for hours. And, since you get a lot of Humdrum tasks that require a lot of fishing to complete, you go through a lot of tedious repetitions with few ways of paying off.
Indeed, the only exception is the cooking mini game, which is the main activity that everyone else seems to support, and therefore is more important. Fishing, foraging, gardening, caring for chickens and buying ingredients is just a means to end a craving hobbit, and all the components you collect are taken home to use you with other hobbits and then use them with other hobbits. You can invite some neighbors to share a meal with you on the game day, and after understanding their preferences and desires, you must mix the right flavors together to maximize your cooking into your cooking style. Doing so upgrades your social links that are designed to reward ingredients and new recipes that open up new possibilities and sometimes lead to a brief conversation between you and any hobbit you attract – a nice return on investments that don’t respect your time in most other areas.
To be clear, the story still doesn't really pin the mini game, as the actual game part isn't great and too simple, especially the first or so left or right before unlocking other cooking tools, which add more nuances. For example, unlocking the soy sauce pan allows you to stir different seasonings into dishes that enhance flavor. Also, you need to take a lot of very boring trivia to get the ingredients you need, and then there is a good chance you will wait for the next day before waiting for a new friend to invite, because there are very few things to do besides a time-gated meal. But cooking and its social elements triggered are at least a relative highlight of life simulations, it is always incredible and it does not develop with other activities over time.
In addition to collecting ingredients, cooking meals and feeding them with a small amount of water, you can improve and decorate small pieces of small counties of the county. The house you offer is quite large at the beginning, but it expands and fixes when the activity is completed, the most important of which is the ability to raise chickens that produce eggs and enter more farm space. Unfortunately, while there is more space and other small improvements, like the actual working front door takes too long to unlock, it has nothing to do with the extra space you give indoors. You can gradually unlock the decorations by completing tasks, but they don't have a lot of variety, adding new shelves and things like what is zero, and the whole layout of the house is static, so you just have to work around the existing floor plan that doesn't have much room for expression. This means that it is often another major appealing component in SIM gaming that feels like it takes only minimal effort. The good news is that when you upgrade completely, the home you give will surely nail the county aesthetic, even if there aren't too many exciting personalized options, at least it can do the job when implementing part of the Hobbit fantasy.
Even if Legend of Charles is more interesting than before, it is purely because of how unacceptable its poor effect is. With constant frame rate segments, pop-ups, aliasing, tough crashes and other weird things that suddenly ruptured, I never walked over a few minutes without going wrong. Worst of all, during my race time, the consistent and repeated crashes forced me back to the table, resulting in a half-hour failure in progress because I had to start the whole day. This usually happens after I share a meal with the Half Body Court, which requires a lot of preparation and planning, which almost makes it crashing. At some point, I repeated five times (a few hours of game time in total), and crashed at the end of each time so much that I wondered if I would permanently ruin something and would not be able to make further progress.
The rest of the issues, such as inconsistent frame rates and how objects popping up in front of the face are more confusing than anything else – I mean, this doesn't seem to be a particularly demanding game that I've played on a high-end PC. It's so bad, especially since the art style of the Charles painting and the iconic environment have great potential, and when you see the bushes walking around you, there's almost nothing. Then there are disposable bugs, like the fishing line that I fished after I fished was stopped in the water, which wouldn't make me put away the pole, so I stretched a long fishing line throughout the map.
I also tried some Switch versions, well, we can only say I had to write a whole review to talk about the terrible thing in this experience. It's worth mentioning that in the end of my story with Shire, there's an update that does improve some frame speed issues a little bit, so at least hope it will be better in the future after some patches. However, even after the recent update, it still doesn't work well.