On Your Tail | Switch Review

Last year, I was intrigued to play Duck Detective: The Secret Salami after Zack mentioned it on the podcast. I absolutely loved it and really wanted more detective style games. Then, On Your Tail by Memorable Games looked like a cozy mystery game coming to the Nintendo Switch that I felt I needed to play. It is definitely a cozy, detective adventure, but unfortunately, the Nintendo Switch version is not optimized and is almost unplayable.

Borgo Marina

In On Your Tail, you play as Diana, a University student who needs a vacation after her paper was not going to be accepted in a competition. She does not know where she is going, but her grandmother always talked of how beautiful Borgo Marina was. She hops on her Vespa and drives to try to find this mysterious Borgo Marina. She eventually finds it, but a masked person distracts her and she crashes and goes unconscious. She wakes up in a mansion, saved by the owner, Orlando, whose house was burglarized last night. Curious, Diana wants to help investigate, starting your adventure.

After some initial investigating around Orlando’s mansion, Diana explores into Borgo Marina, meeting different people and learning more about the town and different occurrences that recently happened. She is eager to investigate, but also wants to interact with different people and needs to earn some money. 

As Diana, you can make friends with people like Paun and play different mini-games, like marble races. You can also earn money by becoming a waitress at a restaurant, delivering mail, or making gelato. Each service has its own unique mini-game, like creating different flavors of gelato, needing to have the right amount of ingredients to create a popular gelato. And no mini-game filled adventure would be complete without fishing!

Detective Work

While exploring the town and making friends are charming aspects of On Your Tail, the majority of them are optional, where the focus of the main story is solving who this masked thief is and the mystery of Borgo Marina. In order to solve different mysteries, Diana needs to find clues in designated areas. To find these clues, she uses a chronolens, which is a magnifying glass that has the ability to turn back time. For example, if a book is on the floor, by pointing to the book you can rewind it back to it being back on the shelf. It can be tricky trying to find all the clues, so you have a set number of times you can get hints of where a clue might be.

Now, the best part of On Your Tail is after you have discovered all the clues for the mystery, you now get to piece together the scene that took place through a diorama setting. You have to get each clue in the correct order so each event could happen, which can be tricky. An example would be the thief needed to enter a room, move to one side of the area, take something, and then leave, but they could not be caught. For each clue you use, a turn will be taken and will play through on the diorama. If the clues are not in the correct order, you have to start over.

While this was often trial and error, I still found it to be very unique, not something I have seen in a game. On Your Tail also has a lot of ways to help, like being able to get a hint at where a clue goes in the diorama. Also, if you fail, it will mark which clues are in the correct spot. They also included a fast-forward feature during these, which is very nice especially when you have had multiple attempts.

Santa Madre!

“Santa Madre” is a phrase that Diana uses when she is frustrated, and even though I did enjoy the gameplay, the Switch version of On Your Tail is rough to play through. First, it feels slow, which might not be exclusive to the Switch, but might be a design of the game. There is a sprint button, but the game has difficulty rendering new areas, so sprinting made it worse. Travelling from one side of the map to the other should take only a minute and a half to two minutes, but often took longer because of how many loading screens I would hit, which load times could be very slow. And that was just while travelling into the open environment.

As frustrating as those could be, I would have still enjoyed the game if they were the only issues. But the worst part of this version is the amount of crashes that I had. The game took me about 10-11 hours to complete and I had ten crashes during my entire playthrough. If I played for more than an hour, the game would eventually crash. Luckily, most of the time, my save was only a minute or two before the crash, but still having to restart and boot the game back up was a nightmare. I have not tried the Steam version, but from what I have read, these problems seem to be exclusive to the Nintendo Switch version.

On Your Tail Final Verdict

On Your Tail delivers on its promise of being a cozy, detective adventure. From making friends and playing mini-games, to solving the crime of the mask thief terrorizing Borgo Marina. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this game on the Nintendo Switch with all of its technical problems. If the gameplay sounds interesting to you, I cannot verify that it runs better on Steam, but if it does, the $30 price tag is well worth the experience.

This review is based off of a Nintendo Switch copy of On Your Tail provided by Vicarious PR for coverage purposes. It is also available on PC.