On Your Tail review — Trial and tail-ror

There are a few things a mystery needs to work, though a good writer can break one or all of these rules. Most important of them all, a mystery needs to have a series of clues people can follow and potentially figure out who the culprit is. If a reveal comes out of nowhere, it feels unsatisfying. On Your Tail is a mystery game I really wanted to like, but its central mystery is poorly thought out and solving it is extremely frustrating.

In On Your Tail, you play as Diana Caproni, an aspiring writer who… isn’t great at writing… yet. Her professors think she has potential, she just can’t tap into without real life experience, while her parents are worried about her future. In a whirlwind of emotion, she sets off alone to the place her grandma loved to clear her head: the village of Borgo Marina. There, Diana will become embroiled in a mystery not just about a string of thefts, but about the history of the town itself.

Your investigation begins in Orlando’s villa at the top of the town, as Diana crashed her Vispa when swerving to avoid the thief in a storm the night before. This first mystery tasks you with finding out how the thief entered, what they stole, and how they got away. You do this with a little card-based board game. Each card represents something happening, and you need to play all the cards in the right order to win.

It sounds like an interesting, game-ified take on mysteries, but in practice it is just trial and error. Before the board game, you need to look around the crime scene using Diana’s grandmother’s Chronolens, a device that lets her see into the past. That sounds incredibly cool, but in practice you’re just wandering around, pulling out the lens over and over in the hopes of stumbling on a change. Each clue you find becomes a card, and once you have all the cards you can get to the board game. You can spend Joker cards here and in all the mystery minigames for a hint, but more often than not I found those hints pretty useless.

There is no logic here, especially near the end of the game, so you just play cards, see which ones you got right in the ending tally, and then try again. This first mystery isn’t so bad, but by the end you have dozens of cards and turns to get through, making the process incredibly tedious. These sections started to take me upwards of 30 minutes to complete, especially once you gain the ability to combine cards, so thankfully when I was in the final stretch someone uploaded a walkthrough (thank you, Count Wackula) because if I didn’t have some direction I think I would have quit.

This system makes you feel less like a detective and more like a competent guesser with the ability to rewind if you get it wrong. The only consequence for failure here is having to start over, which is an incredibly frustrating punishment given how long it takes to get through a single attempt. All it takes is time, so speeding this process up somewhat would have been appreciated.

But wait, there’s more! Sometimes you’ll need to interrogate a suspect. This is another card game that somehow has even less logic or direction. You have two types of cards which you need to match together to get new cards and eventually use those remaining to accuse the suspect. Good luck figuring out which cards go together, why, and remembering the order to do so, because making a few mistakes will make you start over entirely. They are absolutely infuriating, and not helped by the game’s constant typos, mistranslations, text errors, and limited text boxes.

I want to give the game a little slack, since it seems to be originally written in Italian and translated to English, but I encountered persistent text issues everywhere. There’s code leftovers in story-important text, a puzzle on the critical path was mistranslated so I couldn’t actually solve the puzzle organically, and most shop and item text is too long and gets cut off. These issues are constant early on, but only get worse as the game progresses, Later on, some cards required for the story had no text or images on them at all. It feels like playing a feature complete but still early build of a game.

With all that said, there are still some things to like about On Your Tail. I enjoyed getting to know the cast of characters, and Diana makes for a great protagonist. While I find the character models… uncanny, the environments and 2D art look amazing. There are plenty of visual glitches too, like the camera going out of bounds or textures being messed up, but for the most part the game is nice to look at.

Furthermore, while I hated the detective portion of the game, the life sim aspects are much more enjoyable. There are some fun minigames here to earn cash. Even if I could never get the Gelato store to work properly, I loved planning my moves to be the best waitress possible and setting up at the beach for some fishing. With the money you earn, you can buy new outfits, ingredients for cooking, and various items to decorate Diana’s home with. These help you feel more at home in Borgo Marina, combined with your growing familiarity with the town as you navigate its myriad twists and turns each day.

The best part of these life sim aspects was delivering mail. Each day, you can grab a set of letters and packages from the post office to deliver around town. This helped me get to know the town and its inhabitants, even if most of them were just text boxes behind doors. While I enjoyed these aspects, they aren’t enough to sustain the game, however. It really needed that mystery to land to make this a memorable vacation.

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