Top

Backlog Blogging: The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria

Posted on November 3, 2025 by Aywren

Return to Moria is a sandbox survival crafting game set in the Lord of the Rings universe. In this game, you play as dwarves who are attempting to explore and retake Moria for dwarf-kind.

The Posse picked it up as a group game about a year ago. I put over 45 hours into it, though due to IRL circumstances, we haven’t played since January. Which is a bit of a shame, because we did get fairly far (I think) into the story before we took a pause.

The Posse folks are big Lord of the Rings fans (including me), so when this game went on sale, we jumped right in feet-first. While character creation is somewhat limited, the game does allow you to make both male and female dwarves – with females that did have more feminine (and masculine) aspects, which I appreciated.

The basic core of the game feels a little bit like a less-polished Valheim in terms of crafting, gathering resources, and the progression you make as you discover more materials. There is a bit of base building to the game, as well, wherein you claim places within the map and carve out safe locations. Some areas already have the foundations of broken-down crafting stations that you can fix, which are often good spots to set up a base in a new map when you run across them.

Building up a base is almost required because there’s random raids from lurking orcs on a pretty regular basis. I think it has to do a bit with how deep you explore and how much you disturb the areas (such as mining for resources). This can lead to a raid building up more quickly, and you can even find yourself going toe-to-toe with one out in the middle of the mines, rather than in a safe base. Raids out in the open can be pretty tough, too.

Exploration in this game is key. It’s interesting because the maps are procedurally generated as you progress. This means that should you get stuck, or if you need help, there’s not a lot of direct help out there you can find. Your map isn’t going to be the same as another player’s map, so getting around and finding your way through is really on you and whomever you play with.

Multiplayer worked well enough early into the game. But once we explored deeper and unlocked more area in the mines, we started running across where the game had trouble loading chunks of the map, especially for those who were logging into my hosted game. I’d be able to walk into a new zone, which loaded just fine for me, while the rest of the Posse was locked out behind what looked like a dotted-lined loading wall.

This happened more often than I’d like it to have, and I see other folks in their reviews also having trouble with this. While the game does eventually load the zone, sometimes it took true minutes of waiting for my team to be able to join me. That really does take the steam out of exploration, especially when it happens quite often.

Also, the game scales in difficulty depending on the number of players. This means that should part of the Posse be out there exploring while the other half was AFK or chilling at the base doing crafting, those who are exploring had a much more difficult time with battle – especially if they get jumped by a raid. Or the raid happens to come to the base instead. Basically, if the group breaks up in any way, the difficulty was quite a hinderance to exploration in particular.

But when we were together and discovering new things – once we managed to find our way through the crazy generated map, that is – there were some truly amazing experiences to have.

We all loved how if you begin to mine ore as a group, one of the characters can initiate a song that your characters can join in to sing together. Just as one would expect from dwarves working in a mine. The lyrics and tunes for these little sing-alongs were catchy and often quite fun.

There were also areas in which your group could light beacons that would expel the gloom in the mines. To do that, the party grouped around a stone and raised their voice in song. It didn’t matter how many times we ran across this in a map, I absolutely loved the feeling behind those moments.

There are some truly incredible things to see in the mines, as one would hope. And there’s some pretty tough fights to be had, especially when clearing out orc camps and running across bosses. We even got to fight a scenario against the Watcher in the Water!

So, what stopped us from playing?

I don’t remember all the details (though I did jot it down), but we’d explored a deeper area where we, as a party, were having a whole lot of trouble taking down just the normal average enemies in the zone. We all puzzled about the jump in difficulty, and went searching to see if we’d missed anything when it came to outfitting ourselves with gear.

Eventually, it got so rough that I took to the net to find answers.

Turns out, we’d completely overlooked a whole branch of progression when it came to crafting forges and ingot. But it wasn’t at all apparent how we were meant to do this. At least, not during normal organic gameplay. We needed to enchant an axe with runes that would allow us to chop down Ironwood – which would lead us to making the furnace we needed for the gear we needed.

Not a one of us would have ever guessed that enchanting an axe with a rune would have been required for progression. So, we never did it, obviously. And while we could have gone back to get the gemstones we needed for this – these were quite rare – I think we all felt that this was going to be fairly time-intensive.

We didn’t agree to just quit playing the game due to that, though. I’m not sure we wanted to right out quit, especially since we’d had some pretty cool battles with lesser dragons, and even a troll we managed to lure into sunlight to turn to stone.

Still, the whole prospect of the work that would need to be done to progress again somewhat took the wind out of our sails. When other things popped up IRL, we set the game aside, and haven’t returned to Moria since. Especially since we introduced the Posse to Enshrouded, and that really side-tracked us all (as much as I enjoy things about Return to Moria, Enshrouded is mechanically the stronger game).

There is a new DLC in the works for Return to Moria, set to be released sometime this month. Whether we’ll ever come back to it, I don’t know. I somewhat doubt it, though we had fun exploring what we did. But with group games like this, never say never, right?

At least it gave me an excuse to introduce the Posse to "Diggy Diggy Hole!"

Comments