On Your Tail Review – Solving Mysteries in a Seaside Village

On Your Tail by Memorable Games

On Your Tail is, for the most part, a cheerful, cozy narrative adventure set in a coastal Italian village, with gameplay centering mostly around solving mysteries and occasionally interrogating people.

You play as Diana, an aspiring writer who learns at game start that her writing professor admires her technical skill but feels she does not have enough life experience to write emotionally impactful prose. She knows her grandmother, a pilot, loved spending time in the town of Borgo Marina. She recovers her grandmother’s Chronolens, gets on her “Vispa” (that is, Vespa), and rides from Turin to Borgo Marina to explore why – and gain some life experience.

Marina Maze

Borgo Marina is a charming town; the graphics are highly colored and often beautiful, and the town layout itself is complicated in the way that urban areas developed in pre-Modern times often are, with street layouts unencumbered by modern ideas about street grids or cul-de-sacs (more like London than New York or Irvine, in other words).

And that’s a good thing, as you spend a whole lot of the game running through its streets to perform various missions. In fact, the back-and-forthing required to progress is one of the game’s less charming elements.

There’s no quick-travel system, and while you can often overlay several objectives on the terrain – I can deliver mail here, and also I need to talk to someone nearby, and also I need to buy a book on the same street – the running around bit does get tedious at times.

But the streets, and the little details the developers have provided to differentiate them, do have visual appeal. There is a map that calls out locations where you need to go most of the time, but it neglects to tell you about tunnels and some other faster routes between locations, which you will need to learn through experience.

Maddening Marina Mysteries and Italian Interrogations

Aside from conversation among characters and the occasional “go here, do that” quest, there are two main elements of gameplay. The most important one is collecting clues and assembling them to solve a mystery.

Your grandmother’s Chronolens, when invoked, allows you to see the difference between how things look in the present and how they looked in the past. This gives you a “clue” when you find a discrepancy.

UI at screen top tells you how many clues you need to solve the current mystery; you can mostly find these without using other resources, if you are careful, but each mystery gives you a number of “jokers” you can use to “supercharge” your Chronolens, which makes its needle swing faster when close to a clue.

Or, of course, you can use a walkthrough – Steam has a good guide – if you’re stumped.

Once you have all the clues, you then need to assemble them in the correct way to understand what has happened. This is non-trivial. Each clue is represented by a card, and text at the upper right gives you context as well: “first this happened, then that happened.”

A lower-res 2D version of the area appears, along with characters represented not by their in-game 3D image, but by something similar to a boardgame version: a flat 2D cardstock boardgame piece, complete with a quasi-plastic stand. As you propose a possible order in which the clues unfold the mystery, the cardstock images move about the imaginary space, and quite often you will fail: the thief was spotted, for example, when the upper text says they were not, so you have to try a different order of events.

You can brute-force this, trying all possibilities, but it can take several attempts to solve a problem.

This is, in some ways, maddening; finding the correct solution to a mystery is sometimes quite difficult, especially in the mid-to-late game. But it is also a pretty clever design, complexified in the late game by the need to combine clue cards before presenting them, and also starting with a hypothesis card (Did the fire start in the fireplace, dining room, or living room?).

But the upper right text, your clues, and often the images on the clue cards themselves provide some context to help you solve the puzzle. Also, you know, walkthroughs and guides can help.

The second major gameplay system is interrogating people and trying to get them to confess. Cards are involved again, but some are marked as “facts I know,” and some as “what they said.” This involves combining cards and then ultimately presenting two (or in late game, three) as “accusations.”

Again, failure is possible, but the system can be brute-forced.

Gig Economy

There’s a lot more to the game than this; you can work jobs to make money and, in fact, have to at some points, because buying books for information or a fishing rod and such is necessary for progress.

There are three jobs you can work: delivering mail, making gelato (ice cream), and waiting on tables.

I was totally unsuccessful as a waiter; that minigame is timed, and I sucked at it. But I imagine that if you are good at games like Diner Dash, you’ll be fine.

I never actually figured out how to make gelato, and absolutely, the tutorial for that could be better (or at least repeatable), but delivering mail took me all over the town, made me more comfortable navigating the environment, and did provide enough money for me to progress.

I did encounter some bugs; nothing show-stopping, but at one point, I was told to deliver a package to Theodore opposite the gelato shop. Theodore does not live opposite the gelato shop.

There’s fishing; it’s not critical for advancement, but it’s not a bad system.

There’s cooking; also not critical for advancement, but I did like the fact that once you’ve purchased (or harvested from the world) an ingredient, you do not need more instances. When you own coffee, you can always make coffee.

You can buy clothing, but I never did; most of the clothing is a tee-and-shorts mix, so screw that, give me something cuter.

You can buy decor for your apartment.

You can, in fact, when finished with the main quest sequence, spend god knows how many hours maxing out everything, but eh, while I enjoyed the game well enough, I am not going to grind to buy every book in the bookstore and every decoration for my home.

In mid-game, you rent a boat and spend some time visiting islands and other boats in the region; this was one of my favorite parts of the game, actually. Even though the water animation is not spectacular, I did have the feeling of braving the waves with a little speedboat.

Controlling the Investigation

The game advises you to use a controller, and I mostly did, since much of your time is spent navigating a 3D space, and controllers are good for that.

However, the mystery-solving and interrogation systems involve selecting and moving cards; this works much better with a mouse-and-keyboard interface (workable with a controller, but a little more awkward).

So I’d recommend switching between the two UIs, but the game is completable with either alone.

The developer is Italian, and the audio occasionally offers what I imagine is Italian popular music or audio that sounds like an Italian news broadcast. I think this just adds to the game’s setting.

I do feel like some characters do not express themselves all that well in English, and that the English localization could be better. Still, I never felt puzzled as to the characters’ intentions or what they were meaning to say.

I did encounter three bugs: During the “Accuse the Major” sequence, you can return to the island and return without an important cut-scene playing, and feel lost. If you go out to sea again and return, the story progresses, but this is problematic: should’ve gone there in the first instance.

In later gameplay, some options show up with blank cards, but you can progress by always selecting the blank card. And Theodore does not live opposite the gelato shop. Nothing show-stopping, but sure, the devs should fix this (and might have; there was a recent update, and I played the game before it happened).

The game’s characters are all anthropomorphic animals, including the protagonist, but I found this more charming than problematic, and the Italian coastal town setting is distinctly fun, as is the Italian-influenced music and occasional audio.

The Verdict:

Steam says I spent 38 hours in the game, but I imagine you could complete it in more like 20, if you go for solving the main narrative and ignore side quests. You could spend more if you wanted to 100% complete all the things to buy and such.

But whatever way you go, at this price point, it’s good value for money.

The Chronolens provides an interesting alternative to the sorts of mystery-solving in other games. The graphics are bright and engaging and provide a real sense of occupying a coastal Italian village.

On the whole, On Your Tail is thoroughly charming and kept me engaged for more than 30 hours, so bravo (or brava, since the protagonist is female) for that. There are a few bugs, and later puzzles are a bit hard, and okay, the back-and-forthing gets a bit much at times, but on the whole, this is one of the best games I’ve played this year.

On Your Tail is available via the Nintendo eShop and Steam.

Watch the trailer for On Your Tail below:

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