Walking out of Depression with The Lord of The Rings: Return to Moria

The last few years have been a struggle. Not the sort of struggle I state aloud, because tallying it all together, it is both daunting and not daunting at all? I have friends that I may not speak to regularly anymore, but I do pay attention. I do listen. I watch. I read. I try not to take up space with my disasters and challenges when there are others facing far worse than I.

Still, it has not been easy.

In 2023 I discovered I have a vestibular schwannoma in my right inner auditory canal. A benign tumor, but there it is.

Before that I was betrayed by my best friend and recently discovered how much another person I considered a mentor and friend cares very little about me, my work, and yes, it crosses into the business. I lost my favorite uncle to a horrific death after his long battle with alcoholism and dementia with Lewy bodies, my father went through his own troubles (he’s all right now), and like I struggled to deal with the realities of modern American education when I was growing up, my son is now on the yard. He’s five and I know exactly how he feels because I felt it too at five.

We want the world to be a grand adventure.

The hard part about adventures, as Tolkien would show us in his epics we all love and cherish, is that adventures are often not what they seem and go very different than expected. As much as we might leave home for the wider world, we bring something back, and the home we expected to find is not the same place either.

But what if you start from the raw end of creation? What if you’re among the rough-hewn and hardy in a world that seems to treasure the elegant and celebrate the delicate?

Some might say the world wants us to look like elves but works us harder than dwarves.

And it always seems like there is a dragon at the end of it, hording what isn’t theirs.

All of this is to say that I weird found a weird, fantastical mirror for my time of struggle in The Lord of The Rings: Return to Moria, a Survival RPG set in the fallen dwarven kingdom of Moria, known to its displaced people as Khazad-Dum, and one of the pivotal settings for The Fellowship of The Ring.

(It’s where Gandalf fights the Balrog. Balin’s Tomb? The moment when Gandalf starts to hate Pippin. That place.)

Developed by Free Range Games and published by North Beach Games in 2023, the game originally met with middling reviews and reception due to its lack of options and technical sophistication next to other survival games of the like, but was a hit in terms of its writing and worldbuilding within the Middle-earth Legendarium.

Gaming is going through a weird lifecycle at the moment.

Old games from fifteen to twenty-five years ago are receiving quality remakes and remasters while AAA studios create franchises that are hit and miss when it comes to marketability vs. playability/re-playability. Platforms are basically dissolving completely into streaming services that vary from the liberating (the Steam Deck and the platformer are cool ideas) to the terrible (these games are priced too damned high), but one of the reverberations of the streaming of games is the fresh level of discovery and rediscovery have led studios to have longer tails of release and deployment when it comes to DLCs and add-ons.

Free Range Games listened to the game’s critics and issued a DLC called Durin’s Folk.

And the game became magical. I’m not going to say that this is a perfect game. It has some wonky requirements for items and a lack of cohesive narrative structure that is needed to guide the player in making sure they don’t skip needed the places they need to go in exploring and harvesting materials needed for the liberation of Moria, but these are quibbles next to the beauty of its worldbuilding, the design, the writing, its adherence to Tolkien’s view of the dwarves, and the controls don’t suck. What Durin’s Folk added was needed updates and some player-options that really make the flaws of the game (for the most part) vanish beneath an enthralling survival RPG experience.

But somewhere in the Lower Deeps, standing at the end of a pier while watching The Watcher (who survived the encounter in Fellowship) basically scare me away in the midst of figuring out how to get over this damned water to the pumps so I can drain Moria of its inundations, something struck harder than I expected. Throughout the vents spewing a miasmic shadow, the channels and pits filled with the orcs of old, I discovered the gloom I had not known I was miring in.

It is not easy to say one is depressed, nor even recognize the signs of it, but in the process of playing a game where finding the light matters, I dug open a pit of despair I did not know waited down inside of me far worse than any Balrog.

Our past plays a huge impact upon us as individuals and communities, but we sometimes forget how fragmented that past can be because of the trauma we receive along the way. The pain distorts everything, including our views of what happened at the beginning.

Durin looked upon the Mirrormere and saw his people’s destiny. That destiny, forged from thoughts of destined glory and shining mithril, lead to a time of ruin and complete collapse. Sometimes we think the best things will end well and it is so devastating when they don’t.

At one point I considered quitting the game completely. It’s a game, not life.

But something about being a dwarf and digging in that hole, hoping to find not just a way out, but a way back to what it means to be a dwarf, shifted something in my human mind when I found an abandoned camp while searching through the Mines of Moria, a level up from the Lower Deeps.

It was Aragorn’s camp.

To those that do not know, there is a point before The Lord of The Rings where Aragorn travels Middle-earth widely, and among his journeys is a mission into Moria to help Gandalf locate Thrain, the father of Thorin Oakenshield from The Hobbit. In that camp you find this recipe for a potion, and that potion gets you through what you have to do next.

It lets you take a beating when you need to take one. It lets you keep fighting.

Even in the darkest corner of a mine, covered in vents of shadow and teeming with orcs, I had found a real way to make it through.

That’s the beauty of Tolkien’s work—it’s about people, big and small, making it through tremendous challenges with little more than the hope that they can just do it, and finding the endurance to make it. There’s no guarantee, and believe me, you fail more than once throughout your journey in Moria. The orcs will overwhelm you. If you can get out and run away, the shadows will eat at your health bar. You have to eat, rest, conserve your energy, all the while making your day a little bit better than the day before.

And it never ends.

There were many times I fell. Sometimes there were too many orcs to fight one on one. Sometimes the darkness is too deep. Sometimes you just can’t win.

It feels impossible to get up in those moments. You wake up with nothing after you’ve fallen, and it takes real risk and courage to find the things you lost just so you can get started again.

One of the great things that Return to Moria teaches you is that it’s okay to retreat sometimes. It’s okay to rest. It’s okay to work on this thing if it gets you to the next thing. Haven’t tried going this way or doing this thing because you can’t handle this problem right now? That’s part of digging through the darkness. And the game rewards you for deciding to keep working, even if it is on something else.

The greatest strength of Return to Moria is not in its gameplay, or its controls, or the graphics (which are richly rendered through inconsistent at times. Where are my grabapples?)

It’s in the music, and the music lets you know that you’ve made it.

My favorite music is from the lighting of Durin’s Lamps, these ingenious dwarven devices of their ancient times that suppressed the Shadow. When your character begins singing the song to reawaken its light, there is a gratitude and hope built inside of it.

I literally kept playing the game for the simple joy of finding these lamps.

Every single one of them, more than conquering the orcs, or unearthing Moria’s past, brought a serene joy every time I heard that song. You hear the memory of every dwarf that fell, every person you lost, singing together so you can see the way forward again. Balin is singing in there, and Nain, and Frar, and all of the Durins that came before the Deathless, who will reawaken when the whole world is full of light above and below.

Aule made the dwarves to bring light to the dark places.

I won’t spoil anything else, because there is sincere joy in getting to dig your own hole, but I will end on this: Tolkien scholars and Tolkien fans often have great debates about what the Professor would enjoy and appreciate from the volumes and leagues of art, literature, music, and more than has been created in appreciation of what he gave the world with another not so unlike our own in the important ways. I honestly think he would love this game (once he got over the hurdle of “what is a video game?”) because it’s quite clear that the creators, producers, and developers obviously love Tolkien. There is a clear sense of Middle-earth rendered in this epic that takes from the literature and nothing more, and does wonders with building out the Fourth Age with sensible storytelling. Even the ultimate villain (yes, there is one) is a wonderful turn of creativity that doesn’t break anything, but seeks to tie-off ends that Tolkien himself left loose by the end of The Lord of the Rings.

It’s a great love letter fans will deeply adore.

But more importantly, for me (as a fan here and forever), something created by JRR Tolkien reached from the Halls of Mandos to save me once again. Since my father handed me The Hobbit at 11, Middle-earth and the Professor’s stories, and the stories based off those stories, have brought me hope in the midst of despair while reminding me to keep pushing, to keep being kind (not just to myself but others), and to not give up no matter how deep the shadow lie.

And The Lord of The Rings: Return to Moria let me find that.

Emotionally, 10/10. Gaming-wise, a solid 7/10.