There is no shortage of survival and crafting games that players can dive into playing. Norse-inspired Valheim is one of the standout titles, along with games like Rust, Ark: Survival Evolved, and early access V Rising. Fans could soon add another game to that list, with the upcoming The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria.
Developer Free Range Games has announced The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria with a trailer with gameplay. It’s the first crafting survival game set in the Lord of the Rings universe, and players will be able to jump right into it when it hits PC next spring.
Casual fans of The Lord of the Rings will remember Moria as the abandoned city of the dwarves in which the Balrog lives in The Fellowship of the Ring. However, as explained in the trailer, the dwarves are called back to the ancient underground kingdom. Players can join parties of eight dwarven explorers to delve into the subterranean realm of Khazad-dûm, searching its ruins and mines for lost treasures and forgotten riches.
The trailer shows groups of player-controlled dwarves mining, crafting, and building while fending off the forces of darkness that infest the halls of Moria. The trailer makes Return to Moria look big. Moria has an impressive amount of open space for an underground city, with some really beautiful sights.
Return to Moria it also features a procedurally generated world, which guarantees theoretically infinite replayability. Hopefully the trailer is indicative of what players can expect from Return to Moria’s procedurally generated environments, and that players aren’t spending all their time in randomly generated, swappable caves.
Although the Return to Moria trailer shows examples of the game’s core mechanics, the developers go into more detail on the Return to Moria website. As you would expect in a crafting survival game, players will spend much of their time collecting resources and turning them into something useful.
However, mining ore, forging weapons, tools, and armor, and building bases all produce noise. The more noise players make, the more attention they will attract from the sinister Shadow who drove the dwarves from their home long ago. Quoting the developers, “where there’s noise, there’s combat.” Players will need to plan well and prepare to repel the forces that oppose the return of the dwarves.
The developers also state that Return to Moria will have many surprises for fans of the deep story of The Lord of the Rings. Players will find the history of the series woven into the game world as they rebuild Moria and uncover its secrets. Let’s hope that Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria can live up to the great promises of its developer.