Track targets, choose your approach, and see how the party’s bonds change what combos you can use.
Clever Girls is a story-driven, relationship-focused turn-based tactics RPG where the party is four renegade dinosaurs. Ossifrage Games is developing and publishing it, with the full release date still listed as to be announced.
In the setup, the pack is trying to stay free while a corporation and its hired muscle try to take them back, so the game leans on escapes, ambushes, and messy group dynamics as much as straight-up fights.
The tactical side is built around stealth and coordinated hunting, around stalking and ambushing, using the dinosaurs’ senses to track targets, then picking an approach based on the situation.
It calls out three broad solutions: sneaking past danger, tricking enemies with vocal mimicry, or hitting hard with brute force.
Where Clever Girls tries to stand out is in how it ties party drama to combat power. The full game is designed around friendships, romances, and rivalries, tracked through dialogue choices that change how the pack feels about each other.
As bonds shift, the game plans to unlock “Teamwork Abilities” tied to specific dinosaur pairings and the direction their relationship takes. In practice, that means your strongest options can depend on who trusts whom and who is sick of whom.
Outside of battles, the structure mixes exploration with visual novel-style scenes. In the demo, the pack wanders a rural campsite and nearby public spaces, and the dinosaurs comment on what they find through story events.
As the story moves forward, new parts of the map open up, and the environment shifts its ambience over time. The full game pitch broadens that into a near-future sci-fi island full of abandoned corporate ruins, with modern human artifacts that the dinosaurs can equip, plus camp decorations meant to grant stat boosts and perks.
That combo suggests a loop where exploration feeds loadouts, loadouts feed ambush plans, and the narrative pace sets the pressure.
The playable demo on Steam is called Dress Rehearsal, and it is meant as a small slice of the full game. It includes four playable dinosaurs with different capabilities, a short linear story, and three mock battles that teach the basics, plus a quick battle mode for jumping straight into fights.
The demo text is upfront that it skips long-term progression for now, while the full game is intended to add experience-based growth, branching narrative, a deeper relationship system, and more varied enemies and items. Since launch, the team has been backporting improvements from the full build into the demo.
If you want to try it right now, the demo released on August 6, 2025 on Steam, while the full release is still to be announced. Below, I share the trailer.
