Edge Islands is mostly a colony builder. You pick out your three starting heroes, with normal stats like cooking, crafting, mining. Some give mood bonuses or negatives when they do jobs, as well as their general skill in it. It’s probably worthwhile to reroll a few times, but it’ll be hard to cover everything off the start.
The quests button in the top left is your tutorial, to a small extent. Overall the feel is rough, with a lot of the same bones as games like Going Medieval when it first landed, but with less…somewhere. It’s main hook, the differentiator, is tactical combat. It’s a blessing and a curse, while it’s nice to have more control than these games tend to give you, you’re tying up all your heroes at the same time to go get basic resources. Healing also takes a long time, one hp per day it seems, so getting twine(?) from spiders and leather from wolves can be slow going after a combat or two. There are other animals about, deer, chickens, and rabbits, but they mostly seem like nuisance animals. You can catch chickens, which supposedly can give eggs for food, but didn’t seem like it was working in the demo. The other animals will just eat any apples you’ve harvested and not stashed safely. It’d be nice if you could hunt either for leather or food, maybe in a future version.
With how slow going the game plays out, I didn’t get a chance to dive into the dungeons aspect, with more treasures (and more dangers I’m sure). Fully healed my heroes might be able to survive it, it’s just a matter of cutting through any monsters between there and my base, on top of waiting for them to heal up from their last combat.
Maybe with more work I’d feel the game, nothing about it currently seems like it can’t be improved, and it’s a demo for an unreleased game, though it is meant to be out Q1 2025. The demo is still up for anyone interested to try. Maybe it’ll scratch someone else’s itch. Tactical combat is certainly something a lot of people crave. I just feel like it can’t shine without better healing in early game.