The most devastating part about Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game is just how short it falls of fulfilling such an insanely promising premise. I mean, which Tolkien nerd among us hasn’t daydreamed about living a relaxing life as a halfling? But instead of the warmth and comfort of the Shire, I spent 25 hours feeling like I was marching through the Dead Marshes in this cozy misadventure. It’s regrettably dull from start to finish, and runs so badly I wasn’t even allowed to be bored out of my mind in peace. The barebones life sim mechanics offer some of the most shallow versions of classic activities like fishing and farming that we’ve seen done much better in dozens of other games, and building social links with the inhabitants of Bywater is monotonous, repetitive, and never worth the effort. There’s at least some humorous writing and fun moments here and there, and the cooking minigame that serves as the main progression activity thankfully has slightly more depth than the other chores you do, but the few bright spots that exist are drowned out by one of the most disappointing cozy games I played since the Second Age. I went into Tales of the Shire thinking I’d be as happy as Denethor seeing Boromir, but I got Faramir instead.

Though it rarely succeeds in the attempt, Tales of the Shire mostly follows the blueprint of games like Animal Crossing and Disney Dreamlight Valley, with stress-free slice of life activities in a quiet village as the main draw. You’ll try your hand at lesser versions of the usual fishing, gardening, and cooking minigames as you improve your relationships with your fellow townsfolk – all wrapped in a Tolkien skin that plays with the characters and locations found in The Lord of the Rings. The minimalistic story puts you in the hairy feet of a hobbit who’s recently moved to Bywater and begins to establish themself in the community, all while fixing up the rundown hobbit hole you’re given. You’ll meet some recognizable characters like Gandalf and Rosie Cotton and run samey errands for your neighbors in an attempt to get Bywater officially recognized as a village. As is often the case with games like this, it’s not much of a story, but has some likeable characters and amusing moments here and there as the goofy cast of hobbits bicker and squabble over trivial things that only a hobbit would bother caring about. Unfortunately, a complete absence of voice acting inhibits this high point; it just never quite felt right for such colorful and well-known characters to be completely silent throughout the story’s roughly 15-hour runtime.

One of the great things about the life sim genre is that, although they can appear fairly superficial at first, the longer you play, the more you discover hidden layers of depth to get completely lost in. Unfortunately, Tales lacks this essential component. At the point where I’d usually expect to enter an impossible-to-put-down chain of easygoing activities as I build out a quiet, virtual life for myself, it instead had me scratching my head as to what the point of all the monotonous busywork they’d saddled me with even was. That’s mainly because, despite featuring lots of cooking, Tales has very little meat on the bones for the vast majority of its mechanics, like how the best way to make money is to slowly walk back and forth across the very small map, picking up the same very small handful of foragable goods, then selling them so you can buy a single cut of bacon to use in cooking. The only time anything changes is when the seasons shift every dozen or so in-game days and you get a few new ingredients to find and crops to plant, but there’s a whole heck of a lot of tiresome grinding in between those shifts, which ultimately only alter the ingredients you’re collecting and the look of the village anyway.

Nearly every activity you’re expected to grind, from fishing to gardening, suffers from this same infuriating lack of depth. For example, you can only fish in a few spots around the map, and doing so yields the same very small handful of fish with little to augment or evolve your angling over time. When I unlocked my first fishing rod upgrade after completing numerous fishing-based quests, I was hopeful this would expand the number of fishing holes accessible to me or let me catch a whole new roster of sea creatures, but only moments later those hopes were dashed as I returned to the same places and caught the exact same fish I’d been reeling in for hours. And since you’re given tons of humdrum quests that require quite a lot of fishing to complete, you’re subjected to a whole lot of tedious repetition with very little in the way of payoff.

Really the only exception is the cooking minigame, which serves as the main activity that all the others seem built to support and is much more substantial as a result. Fishing, foraging, gardening, taking care of chickens, and buying ingredients are all just a means to an end for your ever-hungry hobbit, and all of the components you gather are brought back to your home to combine into a dish you’ll then use to curry favor with other hobbits. You’re able to invite a few of your neighbors to share a meal with you once per in-game day, and after learning their preferences and cravings, you’ll have to mix together the right combination of flavors to maximize how much your cooking causes them to like you. Doing so levels up your social links, which awards ingredients and new recipes that open up new possibilities, and even occasionally result in a short conversation between you and whichever hobbit you’ve charmed – a decent payoff to your investment in a game that doesn’t respect your time in most other areas.

To be clear, Tales still doesn’t really nail this minigame either, as the actual game part isn’t very good and is overly simplistic, especially in the first dozen or so hours before you unlock additional cooking tools that add a tad more nuance to the process. For example, unlocking the sauce pan allows you to stir different seasonings into your dishes that augment the flavor profile. Plus, you’re required to take on a ton of very boring chores just to get the ingredients you need, and then there’s a good chance you’ll just be waiting around for the next day to come before you can invite new people, since there are so few things to do aside from the time-gated meals. But cooking and the social elements it triggers are at least a relative highlight in a life sim that is so consistently underwhelming, and it does evolve over time in a way that the other activities don’t.

Beyond the grind of gathering ingredients, cooking meals, and feeding them to the residents of Bywater, you’ll also improve and decorate your little slice of the Shire. The home you’re given is pretty rundown at the outset, but is expanded and fixed up as you complete activities, the most important of which is the ability to raise chickens that generate eggs and gain access to more farm space. Unfortunately, although it’s nice to have more room and other small improvements like an actual working front door that takes way too long to unlock, there’s not a lot of interesting things to do with the additional space you’re given indoors. You gradually unlock decorations by completing quests, but there isn’t a ton of variety to them, zero functionality to adding things like new shelves and whatnot, and the entire layout of your home is static, so you have to just work around an existing floorplan that doesn’t offer much room for expression. This means that yet another component that’s usually a major draw in life sim games feels like only the minimum amount of effort was put into it. The good news is that the home you’re given definitely nails the Shire aesthetic when it’s fully upgraded, and even if there’s not many exciting options for personalization, it at least gets the job done when it comes to fulfilling part of the hobbit fantasy.

Even if Tales of the Shire were a more interesting game than it is, it would still be pretty hard to play purely by how unacceptably bad it runs. With constant framerate hitches, pop-in, aliasing, hard crashes, and other wonky stuff that suddenly broke, I never went more than a few minutes without something going terribly wrong. The worst of it was the consistent and repeated crashes throughout my play time that forced me back to my desktop, resulting in half an hour of lost progress as I had to start the entire day over. This often happened right after I completed sharing a meal with my halfling homeys, which requires quite a bit of prep work and planning, making it just about the worst time for a crash to happen. At one point I repeated a single day five times (totaling several hours of game time), with a crash happening at the end of the day each time, to the point where I wondered if I’d permanently broken something and wouldn’t be able to progress any further.

The rest of the issues, like how inconsistent the framerate is and how objects pop up right in front of your face, are more confusing than anything else – I mean, this does not seem like a particularly demanding game and I played on a high-end PC. It’s such a bummer, specifically because the painterly art style and iconic setting of the Shire has so much potential, and almost none of that comes through when you’re seeing shrubbery pop up right in front of you as you walk around town. Then there’s the one-off bugs, like one time where my fishing line stayed in the water when I was done fishing, and it wouldn’t let me put away my rod, so I walked around Bywater with a hilariously long fishing line stretching across the entire map.

I also tried out a little bit of the Switch version and, well, let’s just say that I’d have to write a whole separate review to talk about how especially awful of an experience that was. It’s worth mentioning that near the tailend of my time with Tales of the Shire, there was an update that did improve some of the framerate issues slightly, so there’s at least hope that it will run better in the future after some patching up. But even after the most recent update, it still doesn’t run great.

Donkey Kong Bananza‘s barely been out for a week but already one very determined player has completed the game without touching a single banana.

Sharing the accomplishment on X/Twitter, AKfamilyhome wrote: “Just beat Donkey Kong Bananza with 0 bananas. Honestly a fun challenge. I recommended doing as a NG+ run after 100%.”

Perhaps most interestingly of all, unlike other achievement hunters and speedrunners, AKfamilyhome completed the challenge without any cheeky glitches or clips. Instead, they simply avoided picking up bananas — meaning they weren’t able to unlock any extra permanent health slots or improvements to DK’s base abilities via skill points.

“I skipped Zebra Bananza and didn’t have the ostrich glide, but there are still certain parts that can be bypassed with the right movement,” they added. “It’s pretty much smooth sailing at the start, figuring out some neat ways to bypass certain sections during the mid-game, and then suddenly the endgame forces you to lock in because you die in 1-2 hits,” they added.

“I don’t think there’s any unique dialogue if you beat it without any bananas, but there IS if you beat it without ever obtaining one of the Bananzas,” they teased.

Just beat Donkey Kong Bananza with 0 bananas
Honestly a fun challenge I recommended doing as a NG+ run after 100% pic.twitter.com/ZM1S82gkb4

— AK (@Akfamilyhome) July 27, 2025

“Donkey Kong Bananza is a truly groundbreaking 3D platformer, with satisfying movement, powerful abilities, impressive destructible environments, and clever challenges that all come together in complete harmony to create Nintendo’s first Switch 2 masterpiece,” we wrote in IGN’s Donkey Kong Bananza review, awarding it an impressive 10/10.

Donkey Kong Bananza released last week exclusively on the Nintendo Switch 2. For more, we have a selection of stories in which we spoke to the development team about a number of topics related to Bananza, including how the game was first conceived and the necessity of releasing on the Nintendo Switch 2. You can read our entire interview in full right here.

Did you know speedrunners are already figuring out fast ways to beat the game in as little as an hour and a half?

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Developer Ludogram has announced a new first-person four-player co-op horror game called Invokyr, in which you and up to three friends enter an abandoned house and dare to play a cursed board game from the 1970s. Every dice roll will result in a new trap, dark twist of the environment, wicked creature, or worse. It’s in development for PC (via Steam).

Ludogram CEO Edouard Gaudel said, “Invokyr is a love letter to the thrill of board games and the fear of the unknown. It’s about camaraderie under pressure, betrayal at the worst possible time, and the creeping dread of a house that’s watching your every move.” Watch the announcement trailer above and check out the first screenshots in the gallery below.

You’ll discover single-use dice scattered throughout the house, and rolling it results in a unique effect that can either help or hurt your chances of survival as you face off against the Gamemaster (voiced by Baldur’s Gate 3’s Amelia Tyler). You can (and probably should) work together, but you can also abandon your friends as well if the going gets tough. Meanwhile, Ludogram promises reasons for replayability in that “every run reveals new secrets, unlockable rewards, and deeper layers of the mystery that binds players to the game.”

You can wishlist Invokyr on Steam if you’re interested.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

Long-awaited indie sequel Hollow Knight: Silksong will be publicly playable at Gamescom on Microsoft’s Xbox booth, before its highly-anticipated launch, due sometime before the end of 2025.

Silksong sounds like it will be one of the booth’s biggest draws, alongside a first public outing for the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X — the third-party portable Xbox consoles also out later this year.

The Outer Worlds 2, Xbox’s biggest first-party game for the rest of this year that’s not Call of Duty, meanwhile gets a “theater experience”, which sounds like it’ll be hands-off demo.

In terms of other playable stuff, well, Obsidian’s garden sequel Grounded 2 will be there, if you don’t want to just play the Game Preview version at home. More excitingly, Ninja Gaiden 4 gets a first public hands-on appearance, while Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is there with an “exciting city update”.

Keen to play the new Indiana Jones and the Great Circle DLC? Us too, though on the Gamescom show floor Microsoft is simply showing the base game. (It’s very good but, uh, we played it last year.)

From non-Xbox studios, meanwhile, Microsoft has a long list of playable demos — including the likes of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater and Borderlands 4, plus the Xbox versions of Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Remake Integrade.

If you’re visiting Gamescom, the world’s biggest video games show in terms of its public attendance, Xbox will reside in its usual home within Hall 7 of the Koelnmesse in Cologne, Germany from August 21 to 24. Alternatively, keep an eye on IGN for all of our coverage direct from the show floor.

Silksong developer Team Cherry recently said that its game was on track to launch later in 2025 but before the holidays.

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social