Review: On Your Tail Frustrated My Eyes and Brain
On Your Tail is a bright— too bright—"cozy" game in which you double as detective and vacationer, using the power of your grandmother's chronolens to solve the mysteries plaguing the town of Borgo Marina. Despite its interesting premise, the overall presentation of the game leaves a lot to be desired and it’s difficult to play through thanks to its infuriating mechanics and nauseating visuals.
In On Your Tail , you play as Diana Caproni, an amateur writer whose latest work receives criticism for being dull and by-the-book. To spice up her writing, as well as to get back at her professor, she travels to the seaside haven of Borgo Marina to find inspiration and gain real-world experience. While there, she meets a cast of lively villagers, but finds herself wrapped up in a string of burglaries perpetrated by a mysterious phantom thief. Using the chronolens—a magical device her grandmother gave her that allows her to see how an item or place used to be—she seeks to solve the mystery while befriending the citizens of Borgo Marina. However, there’s more to the phantom thief than meets the eye, and her investigation uncovers a dark secret under the town’s sunny exterior.
Screenshot by Siliconera
While the town’s cast of colorful characters is a selling point for the game, I personally wasn’t a fan. I didn’t dislike them, but I didn’t like them, either. There were a few characters I was interested in. However, needing to deal with them for interrogations or puzzles soured me on them immediately. The story, too, was average as a whole. Memorable Games is an Italian indie studio, and you can see the Italian influences in everything from the dialogue to the very design of Borgo Marina. So if you’re a fan of Italian culture, then you might really enjoy this. Borgo Marina wowed me when I first saw it from a distance. But actually walking through the town was a nightmare that I'll explain later.
The game is a combination between a puzzle game and a “cozy” life simulator. While you can focus on the main story, there’s nothing stopping you from relaxing with all the different activities around town. You can go fishing, work at your part-time jobs, play some mini-games, or hang out with villagers you befriend. For this review, I only played through mini-games for money or to see what they're like, and focused more on the main story. But it was nice to have the option of fishing or cooking when the game started to get frustrating.
Screenshot by Siliconera
And frustrating it got! I have to admit I underestimated On Your Tail . Between its bright colors and anthropomorphized characters, I thought the target demographic was very young children. It technically is for a general audience, but the game isn't the cakewalk I expected. The puzzles can be genuinely difficult, to the point they were more irritating than anything else. It felt less like you have to solve them, and more like you have to brute force your way through them. The more time I spent trying to use deduction, the worse off I was for it.
To collect clues, you have to investigate a crime scene with the chronolens. The chronolens shows you if something changed between the past and present. For example, it'll show you that a map used to be on a car, or that a pew got moved. These are the clues that'll help you later on. But the chronolens can be difficult to use, since the game wants you at a particular angle before it'll register you found a clue. Some differences are so minor I could only find them after expending a joker card for a hint.
After collecting cards, you enter a 3D diorama of the scene. You have to put the cards in order, or combine them with other cards, in order to recreate the crime scene and find the culprit. Failure is part of this procedure, since you might not know the full situation until you play through it once. For example, I didn’t know how long a smoke bomb would last in one mystery, nor did I know how an NPC would move in another. The cards, too, sometimes acted in different ways than I expected, meaning I had to test them in the diorama before I could get to solving the mystery. At times, it involves more guesswork than actual detective work, and because the animations can take a long time even when you fast-forward them, the process feels longer than it should.
Screenshot by Siliconera
Honestly, this mechanic isn't so bad on its own. You could think of collecting the chronolens clues as one half of the investigation, and testing out the diorama and cards as the second half. Interrogations are where I wanted to throw in the towel. During interrogations, you question a villager using various cards. But if they run out of patience from too many wrong answers, you have to try again. The problem is that, since you’re trying to get information from them, you don’t always have all the facts. Like with the dioramas, trying over and over again until you find the right answer feels like the only way to solve these. Lexua in particular ticked me off because all the cards I put together made sense , yet he refused to ever give me answers. It's just such a tedious process.
It really sucks that the mystery adventure aspect of the game, which is arguably the main portion, was so weak. Failure as an inextricable part of the process made it more frustrating than fun. That’s not the kind of deduction game I enjoy. It didn't feel satisfying to solve a mystery. While some did require logic, most of it was just trial and error. The mini-games, too, weren't that fun, either. The best one was the waitress part-time job, outside of the strange lag when you want to grab two of the same dish. A major reason why I didn't have a lot of patience for the quirks in On Your Tail 's mechanics is the visuals. The game is terrible to look at.
Image via Memorable Games
This isn’t a knock on the character designs. It’s everything else. The colors of the town are extremely bright and saturated, and there’s an exaggerated bloom effect over the entire thing. Even after lowering the sensitivity, the camera moves so fast that I got motion sick within only thirty minutes of play time. When speaking with characters, even adjusting the way I sit can cause the camera to move and jerk about. I needed to close my eyes against the DOF filter during dialogue, as well as how fast the camera shakes if I accidentally move in real life. There’s also some sort of auto-adjust for the camera, because it’ll move on its own even when I’m not doing anything. I’ve turned off any option that might cause that in the settings, so I’m not sure what’s going on there.
The camera inside a building is atrocious, between it moving too fast or catching on a wall and then spinning out of control. A lot of the game requires you to run from one end of the town to another, and Diana’s default running speed is pretty slow. But, if you make her sprint in the game, there are these action lines around that really make it nauseating to look at. I have a high-end PC and graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super), and the game will still lag when I move between districts. The stutter itself isn't an issue. It's that the sudden pause is yet another cause of eye strain in a game that's already rife with it. You see this lag a lot as well since, again, so much of the game is running around town.
As if all that's not enough, the camera has an odd quirk where it'll account for stairs. What I mean is that when you take a step on certain stairs, the camera will jerk up and down with Diana's movements. It's pretty bad when you're running, which you'll likely be doing for the majority of your time in Borgo Marina. Each little issue on its own is tolerable. When they work in tandem, it makes for a miserable experience. If this wasn't for review, I don't think I would've played past the first hour at all. So when merely looking at the game made me want to give up, it's hard to remain patient when its main mechanic forces you to try a puzzle again and again and again . Even remembering this is annoying me, that's how infuriating On Your Tail was to play.
Screenshot by Siliconera
A way I found to combat the motion sickness was to play On Your Tail on a laptop, while having a video playing on a larger screen. I would then focus on the larger screen while having the game in my periphery, outside of puzzles and dialogue. Not having to look at the game straight-on helped a lot. I will give it to Memorable Games, though; the design for Borgo Marina is amazing. I never got lost, despite the number of alleys and tunnels you have to take. I’m not the best at navigating maps in video games. But even when I wasn’t giving the screen my full attention, I could get from point A to point B with minimal help.
I really wanted to like On Your Tail since the idea of the chronolens and the 3D dioramas was so interesting. But between the weirdly difficult mechanics, average story, and horrible visuals, it didn’t provide a cozy experience at all. The camera issues appeared as soon as I booted up the game, and they were there even after an optimization patch came out. So they’re just there to stay, I suppose. If you’re looking for a puzzle game, or want something warm to get away from this dreary winter weather, there are other games on the market that won’t kill your eyes while you play it.
On Your Tail is readily available on the Windows PC. It’ll come out on the Nintendo Switch in February 2025 .
The post Review: On Your Tail Frustrated My Eyes and Brain appeared first on Siliconera .
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