This is one of the situations where I feel Steam should give a "Neither" instead of recommend vs don't recommend. The game is fundamentally similar to "My Time in Portia"; What you get for your money is a game that has [i]extremely[/i] good bones, but is very rough around the edges and rather shallow.
If you have watched The Shire segment at the start of Fellowship of the Ring, the game essentially tries to capture those same visuals - everything is extremely bright and vibrant, there are wildflowers and "growing things" all over the place, and just exploring the map is pretty fun for an hour or two. Running around foraging for mushrooms or berries, finding a new place to fish, or just skipping along to interact with the other hobbits in the area is very enjoyable. The character stories are varied, and the motivations and relations between characters feels very much like what I envision hobbit life to be like.
Cooking is by far the standout best feature of the game - each day you can invite some of the characters to a meal with you on the day after, and the morning before the meal they will send you mail with the type of meal they feel like (Bitter, Salty, Sour, Spicy or Sweet). You need to pick a recipe, choose ingredients with flavours that match what you want to make, and then prepare the ingredients for your meal (Chopping, Frying, etc) to meet the texture profile for that recipe. if you can get the texture in the sweet spot, and have used ingredients with flavours that synergise, you end up making a better tasting dish, which when served to the hobbits you invited, gives you a bigger increase to your friendship with that hobbit, especially if it is the flavour they said they were craving.
I do also love that you have all day to serve the meal you invited the hobbits to, and based on the time of day you serve the meal you get a little mini-cutscene where they tell you what meal you served. This did lead to me having the most Hobbit-coded moment of my playthrough, where I ran out of flour the morning I had invited someone over, panicked, and had to run off to buy more "otherwise I won't be able to serve my guests Second Breakfast!"
The downside of this game is that, outside of the cooking, the visuals and the characters, the game itself is very shallow - foraging is just running around picking up stuff off the floor, fishing is just holding the reel in button while rotating the joystick to the opposite direction the fish are trying to swim, and gardening is just putting plants that show smiley faces together in the same raised garden bed. Combine that with he fact that friendships with characters appears to only increase when you cook a meal for them, and you only get new recipes by becoming better friend levels with the hobbits, and regularly the new recipes will require ingredients you won't have yet, and it leads to cooking the same things over and over again rather than cooking the variety of dishes available. This leads to all the mechanics in the game becoming stale very quickly, which is NOT helped by how grindy the clubs feel, ESPECIALLY the cooking club, as you need levels in this club to unlock new cooking methods.
TL:DR - If you are a big fan of LOTR and Tolkien, and enjoy very simple life-sim games, get this one when it goes on sale, you might have some fun for a little while. If you are looking Stardew Valley with Hobbits, this isn't it. Hopefully this gets a sequel though as the potential is there for a trully wonderful series with a little more time spent on making the mechanics deeper.
