The Lord of The Rings Return to Moria is a survival crafting game that takes place during the Fourth Age after the events of The Lord of The Rings. You play as a dwarf of your creation who falls into the depths of Moria. You and potentially up to eight friends now must try and escape the monster infested mines.
The gameplay consists of building camps, mining, singing and fighting hordes of orcs. Its gameplay loop is repetitive and progression is slow. Every time you enter a new area your equipment isn’t good enough so you must build camp, explore for resources, craft them and move on. If you make too much noise you will get attacked by a horde of orcs and I mean a horde. Even if you lower the amount of orcs it is an insane amount you have to deal with. The orcs can also periodically attack your bases and invade your space which is no fun when you’re trying to get quests done.
The quests are very repetitive; a lot of them consist of finding a mystical forge in the mines and using that to craft the next powerful weapon in order to defeat a boss. Since this is a survival game you have to keep in mind your hunger and sleep. If starving you slowly lose heath but being sleepy just makes your stamina lower. You can only cook at bases with a hearth and a table. The food you make gives you buffs depending on the time of day. I have no idea how they can tell what time of day it is here in the mines since there is no sunlight but there it is.
There might not be any sunlight but there are a lot of shadow curses. As you traverse the mines you can be afflicted by so many things; poison, miasma, even just depression. If you’re down in the depths of the mines too long your character will get sad and this will tank your health until you can go high enough that they can see light. Same goes for getting shadow cursed, if you stand in the purple miasma too long it causes your dwarf to become depressed, slowing chipping away at your health.
There is a story to this game. You will get objectives from a raven in the mines named Aric. These will be your main story objectives. Your dwarf will also talk out loud telling you what they know about the area you are in and dwarf lore in general. It’s really neat when you have more than one person because in some scenes they seem to be chatting with each other which is a nice touch. There are a lot of great references to Lord of The Rings sprinkled throughout, you can see signs of the Fellowship and markings from Gandalf around the mines. Your dwarfs will sing a lot of songs which is cute, they can sing while mining to give them a buff. They sing when fixing certain statues to reactivate them. The songs are catchy and fun, I partially like the one where they sing about eating whatever enemy is nearby because you are stupid and hungry.
Overall this game is very tiring to play. You put in so much effort for very little reward. It’s long, repetitive and I just wanted it to be over. It does have its moments especially at the start. I think this game has a great opening and honestly a great ending but the middle part made me want to give up and leave my dwarf to die in the mines like Balin.
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