Fear not, Tolkien fans disappointed by Gollum, we’re still getting The Lord of the Rings game we deserve in 2023. AtGamescomlast week in Cologne, Germany, I sat down with Free Range Games CEO Chris Scholz and director Jon-Paul Dumont to discussThe Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria. I knew very little about it beforehand, yet by the time I left, it had become one of the best games I’d seen at the entire show.
Return to Moria is a survival crafting base builder that has you channeling your inner dwarf and reclaiming Moria to restore it to its former glory. This means cleaning out years of orc stink and rebuilding the world around you while keeping your dwarf’s hunger, energy, and light requirements topped up while keeping them safe from enemies.
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“There’s an element of cosy to it,” Dumont tells me as he shows me his base, explaining that each time he first breaks into a new chamber, he immediately wants to tidy it up. “In a lot of survival crafting games, you’re building a blank slate, but in this game, you’re finding an existing world and saying, ‘You know what, I’m gonna live here now.’”
you may tear down the existing pillars, build new walls, stairs, and floors, and implement doors and windows wherever you want. The level of crafting and building is impressive, and it will undoubtedly be something that players pump endless hours into, creating weird and wonderful sprawling bases throughout the hallowed halls beneath the Misty Mountains.
The team already has proof of this, telling me that in a previous playtest that only offered six hours of content, a third of the players spent over 60 hours playing to hunt down every last resource and create their ideal dwarven base.
There’s an impressive sense of depth and vertical scale. Players can build layer upon layer, there are gold veins you need to build upwards to mine, or brewery stations as high as three storeys that you must build around to reach. Not everything at your base has a practical function, though, as there are plenty of ways to decorate it with shields, suits of armour, weapon racks, and more to create the perfect little dwarven refuge.
A day and night cycle is also present, with some locations having windows that let in the light, and certain crystals illuminate differently during the day. This is handy as it’s not just orcs lurking in the darkness. Trolls are another potential threat and a far more chaotic one, as they’ll attack dwarves and orcs alike. The presence of a troll means a troll hoard is nearby, just like in the books, and you can trick them into stepping into the sunlight to turn them to stone.
As the team guides me through the depths of Moria, they tell me how they kept everything faithful to Tolkien’s work. It was clear to see their love for the world that Tolkien created, and their pride shines through in everything. Multiple members of the Free Range Games team have worked on Middle-earth games before, with many working on The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers game adaptation and Dumont’s first shipped game being The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age.
Return to Moria is set in the Fourth Age, setting it apart from the crowd that came before. What little we know about the Fourth Age is mostly cobbled together from various appendices and unfinished works by Tolkien, so the team felt the weight of telling a story in this unexplored time period, telling me, “Because this is the Fourth Age and the first time anybody’s ever told a story there, what we write is gonna be canon, right? We took this responsibility very seriously.”
Nothing was off limits when it came to Middle-earth, and no restrictions were placed upon the team. “The first lines of the game is Gimli saying ‘Everything you know has been told to you by elves and hobbits, this is a chance for dwarves to tell their own story’. Everything is a little different. That’s intentional because the dwarves know how to tell their own story, not translated through the elves.”
Though Return to Moria is based on the books, there are things you’ll undoubtedly recognise regardless of whether you’re a fan of the films, books, or TV series. There are also countless references for fans to spot. If you make too much noise, you’ll hear the drums in the deep before swarms of orcs descend upon you. John Rhys Davies reprises his role of Gimli for the game, and the team worked with David Salo, a Tolkien expert and linguist who helped build the languages for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, to reconstruct the Khuzdul language of the dwarves for the game.
Dumont tells me how the team worked hard to weave Middle-earth lore into the mechanics of the game, “We learned from The Hobbit that dwarves are more fierce the more treasure they’re defending, so if I want to buff when I’m being attacked by orcs, I need more treasure in my base.”
Return to Moria features key landmarks that fans will recognise, such as the West Gate, the Dimrill Gate, and the Twenty-first Hall, but the areas in between are all procedurally generated. As a result, no two expeditions are ever alike. You could drop in with a dwarven buddy and find their layout of Moria to be vastly different from your own.
Not knowing what to expect is part of the fun. Dumont mines through a tunnel collapse while telling me you never know what will be on the other side of the rubble. It could be just another tunnel, an orc camp waiting to attack you, or something far more grand. As Dumont breaks through the rock, we stumble upon the Tomb of Balin.
“You’ll find and collect these different places—like memorable landmarks—and a lot of them will advance the story,” he tells me. “There are certain collectables you can find, and one is every point the Fellowship visited. When you get further along in the game, once you’ve unlocked everything and you can go wherever you want, you can go to the West Gate and retrace the entire path of the Fellowship, and at the very end of the game, you can rebuild the bridge of Khazad-dûm.”
Good food and heartfelt songs are a core theme throughout Tolkien’s work, which the team was keen to include. Return to Moria features a whole album’s worth of original songs sung by the San Francisco Opera. Inspiration will strike and Dwarves will begin to sing while mining, while drinking, and at various important points in the narrative. As each player chooses their accent, voice, and pitch for their dwarf, this affects their singing voice also, and when you play in groups, your dwarves will all harmonise together.
Players can brew beer and cook food in their ovens, including recognisable dishes and snacks like Lembas, which they can take into the mines as rations or gather around the table to eat in their base. When playing with friends, the dwarves will all sit together huddled around the table to share a meal.
“Survival games are known for being super brutal. There needs to be some of that to be authentic as a survival game,” Dumont tells me. Moria was chosen because, other than Mordor, it’s probably the most dangerous place in Middle-earth. There are no difficulty options within the game, so you have to get good or become good friends with someone more skilled than yourself. you may use inventories across characters, though. If you have a high-level dwarf and you want a little help on a fresh character you’ve rolled, you can use their inventory.
One thing the team greatly emphasises is how the procedurally generated nature of Return to Moria will allow them to update it regularly. While there are no difficulty settings at launch, Dumont promises that a planned future update will allow players to finetune their experience more. “We’re going to add in the ability to generate the world with different settings. So being able to set it easier, add more orcs if you want to, change the amount of resources.”
Another update will allow players to domesticate animals, too, as the team have plans to add various features, “There’s so much we didn’t get to that we want to build in. Locations, fun things, we want to make even more kinds of meals, even more kinds of crafts.”
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria launches on October 24for PlayStation 5andPC via Epic, offering up to eight-player co-op on PC and up to four-player co-op on PS5. An Xbox version is planned for next year.
