A cat that learns new combat moves to take down a badger is not the image most readers associate with Warrior Cats, the young-reader book series about feral cat clans living in fictional forest territories. But that's the pitch behind Clans of the Forest, a new Steam listing from developer Bamtang Games and publisher Trailmark Games that turns the series' Lake Territories into the setting for a turn-based tactics RPG.
Filed under Trailmark Games LLC, with Warrior Cats trademark rights held by Working Partners Ltd, the listing doesn't yet carry a release date or a single user review. It hasn't launched. But the feature list already lays out a surprisingly structured combat and exploration loop for a license best known for middle-grade fiction.
A trailer for the game has surfaced online, offering an early look at the combat and territories described below:
What the Turn-Based Tactics RPG Combat Actually Looks Like
Players create a custom Warrior Cat and build standing with their Clan by completing quests, but the headline system is turn-based battling. According to the Steam page, players face off against rival Clans as well as wildlife, mice, squirrels, and badgers among them, and unlock new combat moves as their cat's reputation grows. That's a real departure from the series' usual pounce-and-claw skirmishes on the page, which resolve in a paragraph rather than a menu of abilities.
Combat isn't the whole game, though. A foraging system lets players gather materials from the territories to craft items back at their den, and traversal leans on the kind of physical vocabulary longtime readers will recognize: climbing trees, pouncing through undergrowth, tracking scents, and solving environmental puzzles along the way.
The Lake Territories, rendered explorable
Each of the four Clan territories from the books is mapped as a distinct explorable zone: ThunderClan's dense forest, RiverClan's marshlands, ShadowClan's dark pine swamps, and WindClan's open moors. Also confirmed as locations are The Moonpool and The Island, two of the series' most narratively loaded sacred sites, and the story hook centers on uncovering the mysteries of StarClan and its prophecies, the ancestral-spirit mythology that has driven the books' plots since the series began.
That combination, a tactics layer bolted onto a setting built for younger readers, is part of a wider pattern of licensed book adaptations reaching for tactics-RPG mechanics as a way to hold onto readers who grew up with the source material without losing the audience still discovering it for the first time. Turn-based systems give a studio room to add strategic depth, cooldowns, move unlocks, positioning, without raising the reflex demands that would shut out a younger player base.
What's still unconfirmed
No release date appears on the Steam page, and combat specifics like difficulty scaling or how many combat moves a cat can eventually learn aren't detailed yet. Platform support is Windows-only for now, with Steam Achievements, Steam Cloud, and Family Sharing confirmed, and the interface supports six languages including English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Dutch, though full voice audio is confirmed only for English. Built around an RTX 3070 or RX 6800 XT, the recommended spec sheet suggests a more visually ambitious game than the premise might imply. Two Steam Curators have already reviewed the listing, even with no public build in players' hands yet.
Follow the original reporting as this develops.
