Review scoopings 2/5 · Mar 19, 2022
Great Idea And Opening, Loses Its Luster As It Devolves Into Just Another Text Adventure
Look: 6/10
I love love love the feel of that opening screen. 
Ahhh, the Shire. And to think we are gonna go on the full journey! (I assume...). Only problem is, I'm playing the original '82 ZX release, so the drawing is slow hmmm I hope I don't get impatient. This seems worth playing a later version, worst case scenario. …
Look: 6/10
I love love love the feel of that opening screen.
Ahhh, the Shire. And to think we are gonna go on the full journey! (I assume...). Only problem is, I'm playing the original '82 ZX release, so the drawing is slow hmmm I hope I don't get impatient. This seems worth playing a later version, worst case scenario. Overall, tho, the graphics in this were a bit mediocre/disappointing for such exciting settings and potential.
Play: 6/10 Wow, very advanced parser for '82. And gosh, you definitely move awfully fast haha. Straight from The Shire and on :-p I like the use of key retrieval/use, you don't see that enough in text adventures imo. The goblins dungeon part got a little tacky, and deviated from the story (which was what I was excited about) a bit too much. I wound up giving up while searching the maze-esque dungeon for the ring, cuz I got captured by the goblin a few times and the fun slowly drained away. I know RNG-based capturing/pettiness is a fundamental part of text adventures, but I can't claim it's a part I like :-p Otherwise, it's really just another text adventure with a particularly advanced parser (which is barely put to use... "say to" isn't all that exciting tbh). That one game where you switch between Jason and Hercules, that felt like a much more exciting innovation.
Feel: 7/10 The 2003 PC/Gamecube Hobbit game was a guilty pleasure of mine; I knew it wans't all that good, I was generally "too old" for games at that point, and I never got much past the Shire. but it has always stood out in my memory. The feel of exploring the Shire, finding all the random collectibles for no reason, doing all the quasi-quests for the residents, figuring out the collision masks and edges/horizons of the graphics and crudely done platforming up to areas not intended to be jumped up to (an old favorite habit of mine, exploring the edges of platformers' coding... Jak and Daxter I would do that a lot in too... and Crash 3 but that actually served a purpose once I was going for beating the levels' time records. But yeah, the feel, setting, and basis to this is what kept me going as long as it did. The initial excitement of the opening screen disappeared quite quickly.
Attachment: 6/10 By no means is this bad, but other than the opening screen, it really wasn't exciting. Which is sad, cuz I was excited to play through the entire Hobbit plotline. Play this if you love the Hobbit and don't mind frustrating text adventures. I, on the other hand, feel like I'm moving on from the early videogame era where text adventures ruled, and it's time to get more into action-adventures, platformers, and (hopefully) RPGs.
Completion: To the point of searching for the ring after escaping the Goblin's Dungeon prison a second time Playtime: ~45 mins