Halfling Dale

(No rating entered since I only played the free Chapter One)

Look, I get it: if you asked me what fictional world I’d want to live in, the Shire would definitely come to mind. Sure, it’s parochial and insular and state capacity is sufficiently low that per the book one point five sufficiently-motivated randos came close to knocking the whole thing over, but the flood of tourism New Zealand saw after the release of the films testifies to the impression those rolling hills, those lush gardens, those curly-headed children made on the broader public. As idylls go, the hobbit life seems hard to beat, and I say that as someone who’s never smoked pot, er, Longbottom Leaf – so a cozy game offering the opportunity to live life as a humble homebody who doesn’t go following wizards off on adventures has immediate appeal.

On the evidence of the one chapter provided as a free demo, Halfling Dale seems well-positioned to satisfy the fantasy. The model here is very clearly Choice of Games, down to the main audience being phone-users (in fact there’s no PC option so far as I can tell) – the blurb highlights character customization options, romanceable characters, and the number of words, so really, based on what I know about the CoG house style, this is a close match. There doesn’t appear to be a stats page where you can track the effect your decisions are having on your character, but there are an opening set of choices where you can establish some of your hobbit halfling’s traits so I suspect there’s a similar system running under the hood – though of course rather than being strong, tough, or social, here you can opt to be imaginative, mischievous, or have a good sense of humor, and you’re your job options include apiarist or cheesemonger, which make for a nice fit for this pastoral subgenre.

Of course, the game isn’t set in the Shire, but in its non-union Mexican equivalent, and here’s where some problems start to crop up. The Scylla and Charybdis of the pastiche are either hewing so closely to the source material that you wind up in an uncanny valley, or making so many intentional departures that things start feeling incongruous. Halfling Dale definitely errs on the side of the former rather than the latter (though the fact that the halflings all love to play Go did tweak my what-the-heck-is-a-Chinese-game-doing-in-Hobbiton sensibilities). The game starts with a birthday party that involves a long speech, okay. You’ve got a family member who’s got a disreputable-by-halfling-standards association with dwarves, sure. And then there’s a wilderness-dwelling protector who frowns a lot, and you learn some backstory which has to do with well-meaning free folks needing to find a long-lost artifact to keep an ancient evil at bay, and the list of default options for your character’s name includes “Fredegar” and “Lotho”, and come on now, you don’t need to have the literal plot of Lord of the Rings playing out in the background to make this setup work.

In fairness, so far when it sticks to its knitting the game seems to work well. Your mom vents her frustration at your brother’s iffy friend by calling him a “confustable dwarf”, and the intimation that the fair that appears to make up Chapter Two involves a Naughtiest Parsnip contest is certainly intriguing (this thing’s rated G, right?) And the intro does efficiently set the table, establishing the world, your character, your family situation, and the ominous backstory, while still having time to offer each of the romance options a bit of spotlight time. If you’re not overly fussed about the degree to which pastiches cleave to their source material, and the CoG model is one that appeals, I suspect you’ll be in good hands with Halfling Dale; to be honest, though it’s not my usual cup of tea, I definitely experienced some of the draw myself.