Return to Moria is a strange, uneven, and oddly sincere game. I mean that as a compliment. At its best, it nails something that’s harder than it looks. It makes Moria feel like a place again. Not a backdrop. Not a dungeon you sprint through for loot. A place with weight, history, and danger baked into the stone. You’re not conquering Moria. You’re surviving it, one torch, one tunnel, one bad decision at a time. Co-op is where the game really comes alive. Playing with friends turns the whole experience into an actual expedition. Someone is mining. Someone is building. Someone is lost. Someone is yelling because they woke up something they shouldn’t have. Those moments feel genuinely dwarven in spirit. Shared labor, shared panic, shared triumph. When things go wrong, and they will, it feels earned instead of cheap. Exploration is the soul of the game. Digging into the dark, reclaiming forgotten halls, stumbling into ancient ruins, all of it sells the fantasy. There’s a quiet tension to moving forward, knowing light and sound matter, knowing Moria does not forgive carelessness. When the atmosphere clicks, it clicks hard. This is one of the few Lord of the Rings games that understands restraint. It lets the setting breathe instead of shouting lore at you. Combat, unfortunately, is the weakest pillar holding the whole thing up. It works, technically, but it’s clunky. Animations feel stiff. Enemy behavior can be awkward. Fights sometimes feel like obstacles rather than encounters. You don’t feel like a legendary warrior. You feel like a stubborn dwarf swinging through molasses. That can be immersive in small doses, but over time it wears thin.
There are also rough edges you can’t ignore. Bugs, jank, occasional confusion in progression. It sometimes feels like a game that needed more time in the forge. You can see the intent. You can feel the passion. You can also see where the hammer slipped.
Still, I keep coming back to how it feels overall. This game understands that Moria is not about power fantasy. It’s about endurance. About reclaiming something that doesn’t want to be reclaimed. About the long grind of survival underground with only stone, song, and stubbornness to keep you going.
If you play solo, it’s solid but flawed. If you play co-op, it becomes something else entirely. Messy, atmospheric, tense, and memorable in ways that polished games often fail to be. Return to Moria isn’t perfect. It’s not smooth. It’s not elegant. But it has soul, and that counts for more than people like to admit. In a landscape full of safe, focus-tested games, this one at least dares to feel heavy. And in Moria, heavy is exactly right.

It's a really fun game, but if you want to play multiplayer you need the Epic Games website or auth system to be functional and working!

I was having a lot of fun playing it, but even though I bought it from Steam, it's dead in the water unless the Epic games authentication system is functional.

When I couldn't host network games anymore, I decided to try to use the dedicated server. But the dedicated server refuses to launch as well.

Developers: why even use Epic Games infrastructure at all? Steam has all the auth services to stop people from stealing your IP or playing without paying for it!

i would recommend this game if they finally addressed all the glitches. i have tried 2 playthroughs and the first i got near the end and then died outside of the boundaries. losing the durins axe needed to actually complete the game with no way to recover it. the second time was a glitch where the screen just kept refreshing/time skipping back like a fraction of a second and was stuck in an infinite loop that the only way out of was to restart the game (no other game functions would work. even reloading the game put me back in the exact same situation! I really dont want to start the game over for a 3rd time!!