There is no shortage of survival crafting games for players to sink their teeth into. The Norse-inspired Valheim is one of the more prominent titles, along with games like Rust, Ark: Survival Evolved, and the early access V Rising. Fans might soon be adding another game to that list, with the upcoming The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria.
Developer Free Range Games announced The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria with a gameplay trailer on June 10th. The first survival crafting game set in The Lord of the Rings universe, players can delve into the depths when it arrives on PC next spring.
Casual Lord of the Rings fans may remember Moria as the abandoned dwarven city home to the Balrog in The Fellowship of the Ring. However, as the trailer explains, the dwarves are being called back to the ancient, underground kingdom. Players can join bands of eight dwarven explorers to delve into the underground realm of Khazad-dûm, searching its crumbling mines and ruins for lost treasures and forgotten wealth. The trailer shows bands of player-controlled dwarves mining, crafting, and building as they fend off the forces of darkness infesting the halls of Moria.
The trailer certainly makes Return to Moria look big. Moria has an impressive amount of open space for an underground city, with some genuinely gorgeous vistas on display. Return to Moria also boasts a procedurally generated world, guaranteeing theoretically infinite replayability. Hopefully, the trailer is indicative of what players can expect from Return to Moria’s procedurally generated environments, and players won’t be spending all of their time in interchangeable, randomly generated caves.
While the Return to Moria trailer showcases examples of the game’s core mechanics, the developers go into more detail on the Return to Moria website. As one expects from a crafting survival game, players will spend much of their time gathering 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 gather from the sinister Shadow that drove the dwarves from their home long ago. To quote the developers, “where there’s clatter, there’s combat.” Players will need to plan well and prepare to repel the forces opposed to the dwarves’ return.
The developers also claim that Return to Moria will have plenty of treats for fans of The Lord of the Rings’ deep lore. Players will find the series lore woven into the game’s world as they rebuild Moria and unravel its secrets. Hopefully, The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria can live up to its developer’s big promises.
The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria launches for PC in Spring 2023.
Source: Free Range Games