Tales of the Shire embraces a 'clutter-core experience' with grid-free decorating for your hobbit house

Cozy Lord of the Rings life sim Tales of the Shire is embracing the comforting mess of Hobbiton by allowing players to decorate without being locked into a grid.

Currently slated for release on July 29, Tales of the Shire invites players to live the hobbit life in the village of Bywater, where they can garden, fish, cook, craft, and, of course, decorate. In a dev update posted on YouTube this weekend, the developers shared some new details about how decorating will work in the game, or rather how it won't work.

UX designer Jordan Peat explained, "Home decoration is kind of one of our core ways of expressing yourself in the game. Very early on we actually decided on making it gridless, so you don't place anything on a square within a grid."

A grid-free decorating system means you have the freedom to place items however and wherever you want, even if the end result turns out messy or cluttered.

"If you want to, you can cover your wall with shelves and pictures and all of that, and you can put individual items on every shelf," Peat added. "Big items, small items, there is no limit to the kind of stuff you can have in your house, which allows the player to kind of engage in a 'clutter-core' experience."

Personally, I love having that kind of freedom in games like this because a gridless decorating system makes it much easier to create a unique home that looks and feels organic. As the developers point out, gridless decorating is also more accurate to what we see in Bag End in the Lord of the Rings (and Hobbit) movies, with books, papers, and various whimsical knick knacks scattered all over the place.

Gridless decorating isn't found in many other games in the genre, like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing. Palia, which has an art style similar to Tales of the Shire, has a good gridless decorating system that I've enjoyed much more than the more restricted systems in Stardew or AC, so I'll be curious to see how Tales of the Shire's decorating experience compares.

The devs also showed off how the camera angles in Tales of the Shire will shift to make decorating easier. When you switch into decorating mode in your house, the camera zooms out to a top-down "doll house" cutaway view where you can more easily move around all your furniture, paintings, and books before going back to the normal camera angle.

We'll have to wait a bit longer to try all of this out since Tales of the Shire isn't launching until July 29, after a delay earlier this year. I'm looking forward to giving life in Bywater a try, but I'm also hoping Tales of the Shire brings something new to the cozy game genre beyond just the Lord of the Rings.

Tales of the Shire will launch on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch, and is available to wishlist now on Steam.