Return to Moria arrives on Steam with mining, crafting, and a “Golden Update”

Enlarge / It’s hard work, survival crafting, but there are moments for song, dance, and tankards. (credit: North Beach Games)

The dwarves of J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing are, according to the author himself, “a tough, thrawn race for the most part, secretive, retentive of the memory of injuries (and of benefits),” and “lovers… of things that take shape under the hands of the craftsmen rather than things that live by their own life.”

Is it secrecy and avarice that explains why The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria spent its first year of existence as an exclusive to the Epic Games Store? None can say for certain. But the survival crafting game has today arrived on Steam and Xbox, adding to its PlayStation and EGS platforms and bringing a 1.3 “Golden Update” to them all. Steam Deck compatibility is on its way to Verified, with a bunch of handheld niceties already in place.

The Golden Update grants new and existing players a procedurally generated sandbox mode to complement the game’s (also generated) campaign, new weapons and armor, crossplay between all platforms with up to eight players, specific sliders for difficulty settings, and… a pause function in offline single-player, which seemingly was not there before.