On Your Tail Review
With its idyllic Italian setting and cute animal characters, On Your Tail won my attention right away. As a cosy mystery-solving game with a flair for representing everything in cards, On Your Tail seemed to check all the right boxes. Actually playing it, however, proved that not all that glitters is made of gold.
In On Your Tail, aspiring writer Diana Caproni, desperate for inspiration, travels to the sleepy seaside town of Borgo Marina. Her arrival proves to be the start of quite the impromptu adventure, as she crashes her ‘Vispa’ scooter and discovers that the town has been afflicted by a string of mysterious thefts.
Diana’s winning, adventurous personality is easy to love even before the game properly starts in Borgo Marina. She’s the glue that holds the game together with her gumption and empathy, and running around town while meeting new people with her was a delight.
On Your Tail shines at exploration by plopping you in a just-right-sized and leaving getting around to your devices. You get a handy, labelled map, but no mini-map, compass, or waypoint markers to get in the way.
If you’re told to get to a Via Valrouge or a Porto Vecchio, you’ll have to pull up the map and figure out your own way there, the old-fashioned style. And before you ask, no, Diana doesn’t have her smartphone with her on this adventure. Call it one of the hazards of spontaneous vacation decisions.
My favourite activity in Borgo Marina proved to be delivering mail to its residents in exchange for cash. You’re given an envelope or a package, the receiver’s name, and an address that might be as specific as a number and street or a direction as a vague as “the house opposite the grocer’s”.
What’s more, the game lets you attempt to deliver any package to any character’s house, making it all the more important that you remember or look up which package goes to whom. Combined with the game’s organic exploration, it made for a fun, relaxing time running around in the cramped alleys and liberating plazas of Borgo Marina.
It’s a pity, then, that On Your Tail’s main gameplay isn’t delivering mail. Its main thrust, solving mysteries, is a frustrating exercise in trial-and-error and guesswork that starts off feeling odd, grows to become frustrating, and towards the end of the game, becomes an outright nuisance.
Over the course of the game, you’ll encounter fifteen mysteries to solve. For each one, you must use Diana’s grandmother’s ‘chronolens’ to look into the past and acquire clues. Once you have all the clues down, you enter the mystery-solving phase, where you reconstruct the events of the past by arranging a set of event cards in the right order.
The game gives you plenty of opportunity to mess up here by illustrating every possible permutation of events as you put them together. However, many of the events in these mysteries can be accompanied by unintended events, which are not explained until you use that particular event card. You might use a card expecting an action to be performed by one character, only for it to be done by another character entirely, ruining whatever hypothesis you had in mind.
Oblivious to how frustrating its mystery-solving is, the game makes matters more and more complex by having you combine cards and then use ‘hypothesis cards’, which branch into different sequences of events. It’s an utter waste of time, and towards the end of the game I used the game’s limited hint system quite liberally, not only because I needed the help, but because I couldn’t imagine putting up with the mystery-solving segments.
There’s a lot of other activities to fill your time with while you’re in Borgo Marina, such as fishing, hanging out with friends, cooking, working as a waitress, and sailing out to sea. Some of these work, such as the waitress minigame, while others don’t, such as the strangely punishing cooking mini-game.
Other times, the game baffles with its design choices, such as blocking the ability to exit a logic puzzle and come back to it later, which forced me to Alt+F4 the game to desktop and then resume from my last save.
These missteps are worth lamenting, because On Your Tail is a genuinely gorgeous game to look at and listen to. I could run around in the streets of Borgo Marina forever, memorizing its street names, and marveling at its colorful walls. Its moment-to-moment writing is cozy enough to hold interest, even if the story takes some strange turns in the final third.
It’s a shame that I can’t recommend this game simply for its lovely running-around-delivering-things moments, because to experience that, you also have to endure the game’s viciously frustrating mystery puzzles. Best to forget this tail… and tale.
Developer: Memorable Games
Country of Origin: Italy
Publisher: Humble Games
Release Date: December 16, 2024 (PC, Switch)
This review is based on a copy of the game provided by the publisher. The PC version of On Your Tail was played for this review.
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