Review: Your tail disappoints my eyes and brain

On your tail is a light—also bright—”cozy” game in which you play detective and vacationer, using the power of your grandmother’s stopwatch to solve the mysteries plaguing the town of Borgo Marina. Despite its interesting premise, the game’s overall presentation leaves a lot to be desired and is difficult to play through thanks to frustrating mechanics and nauseating visuals.

IN On your tailYou play as Diana Caproni, an amateur writer whose latest work is criticized for being dull and out of place. To spice up her writing as well as to get back at her professor, she travels to the seaside paradise of Borgo Marina to find inspiration and gain practical experience. While there, she meets a group of lively villagers but finds herself caught up in a series of thefts committed by a mysterious ghost thief. Using a stopwatch—a magical device her grandmother gave her that allows her to see what an item or place was like before—she seeks to solve the mystery while befriending the citizens of Borgo Marina. But there’s more to the phantom thief than meets the eye, and her investigation uncovers a dark secret hidden beneath the town’s sunny exterior.

While the town’s colorful cast of characters is the game’s draw, I personally wasn’t a fan. I don’t hate them but I don’t like them either. There are a few characters that I care about. However, having to face them for questioning or solving puzzles made me instantly feel uncomfortable with them. Overall, the story is also average. Memorable Games is an Italian indie studio, and you can see the Italian influence in everything from the dialogue to the design of Borgo Marina. So if you are a fan of Italian culture, you might really like this. Borgo Marina amazed me when I first saw it from afar. But actually walking in town is a nightmare which I will explain later.

The game is a combination of 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 a part-time job, play some mini games, or hang out with villagers you befriend. In this review, I only played through the mini-games for money or to see what they were like and focused more on the main story. But it’s nice to have the option of fishing or cooking when the game starts to get annoying.

And it’s so frustrating! I must admit I underestimated it On your tail. Between the bright colors and anthropomorphic characters, I think the target audience is young children. Technically it’s intended for a general audience, but the game isn’t the engaging game I was expecting. The puzzles can be really difficult, to the point where they’re more frustrating than anything else. It doesn’t seem like you have to deal with them, but more like you have to use force to overcome them. The more time I spent trying to use my ability to reason, the worse I felt.

To gather clues, you must investigate the crime scene using chronolens. Chronolens shows you if something changed between the past and present. For example, it will show you that the map used to be on the car or that a row of seats has been moved. These are clues that will help you later. But the timer can be difficult to use because the game wants you to be at a specific angle before registering that you’ve found a clue. Some of the differences were so small that I was only able to find them after using the joker tag for hints.

After collecting the cards, you import the 3D model of the scene. You must arrange the cards in order or combine them with other cards to recreate the crime scene and find the culprit. Failure is part of the process, as you may not know the full situation until you play through it once. For example, I don’t know how long a smoke bomb will last in one mystery, nor do I know how NPCs will move in another mystery. The cards, too, sometimes behaved in different ways than I expected, meaning I had to test them in the diorama before I could solve the mystery. Sometimes it requires more guesswork than actual detective work, and since animations can take a long time even when you fast-forward them, the process feels longer than it should.

Honestly, the mechanic itself isn’t too bad. You can think of gathering chronological clues as one half of the investigation and testing the diorama and cards as the second half. The interrogations are where I want to give up. During interrogation, you interrogate a villager using various cards. But if they get impatient because of too many wrong answers, you have to try again. The problem is that because you’re trying to get information from them, you don’t always get all the facts. Like dioramas, trying again and again until you get the right answer seems like the only way to solve these problems. Lexus especially annoys me because of all the cards I put together significantbut he refused to ever give me an answer. It’s just a tedious process.

It’s too bad that the mystery adventure aspect of the game, which is supposed to be the main part, is so weak. Failure as an integral part of the process makes it more frustrating than fun. That’s not the kind of deduction game I like. I don’t feel satisfied when I solve a mystery. While some require logic, most is just trial and error. The mini-games aren’t very interesting either. The best part is the part-time waiter job, other than the strange lag feeling when you want to get two of the same dishes. One main reason I don’t have much patience with the oddities in On your tailThe mechanism of is the image. The game is terrible to look at.

This is not a knock on character design. That’s everything else. The colors of the town are extremely bright and saturated, and there is an over-blooming effect across the entire scene. Even after reducing the sensitivity, the camera moved so quickly that I got motion sickness within just thirty minutes of playing. When talking to characters, even adjusting the way you sit can cause the camera to move and jerk. I need to close my eyes to the DOF filter during dialogue, as well as the camera shake rate if I accidentally move in real life. There is also some auto-adjustment feature for the camera as it will move on its own even if I don’t do anything. I’ve turned off every option that could cause that in the settings so I’m not sure what’s going on there.

The camera inside a building is very bad, it moves too fast or gets stuck on the wall and spins out of control. Most of the game requires you to run from one end of town to the other, and Diana’s default running speed is quite slow. However, if you make her sprint in the game, there are action lines all around that really make you feel sick just looking at it. I have a PC and a high-end graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super), the game will still lag when I move between districts. Stuttering itself is not a problem. That sudden pause is another cause of eye strain in a game that’s already rife with it. You also see this lag a lot because again, a lot of the game is running around town.

As if all that wasn’t enough, this camera has the odd thing about it taking up stairs. What I mean is that when you walk up certain stairs, the camera jerks up and down following Diana’s movements. This is pretty bad when you’re running, which you’ll probably be doing most of your time in Borgo Marina. Every small problem is acceptable. When they work in tandem, it makes for a miserable experience. If this hadn’t been considered, I don’t think I would have played beyond the first hour. So while just looking at the game makes me want to give up, it’s hard to stay patient when its core mechanics force you to try the same puzzle over and over again and again. Even remembering this makes me uncomfortable, it’s infuriating On your tail is to play.

One way I’ve found to combat motion sickness is to play On your tail on your laptop while playing video on a larger screen. Then I’ll focus on the larger screen while playing the game in my periphery, outside of the puzzles and dialogue. Not having to look directly at the game helped a lot. However, I’ll give it to Memorable Games; Borgo Marina’s design is amazing. I’ve never gotten lost, despite the number of alleys and tunnels you have to go through. I’m not the best at navigating maps in video games. But even when I’m not fully focused on the screen, I can still get from point A to point B without much help.

I really want to like On your tail because the idea of ​​stopwatches and 3D dioramas is so exciting. But between the ridiculously difficult mechanics, average story, and terrible visuals, it doesn’t make for a cozy experience at all. The camera issues appeared as soon as I started the game, and they persisted even after the optimization patch rolled out. So I assume they are just there to stay. If you’re looking for a puzzle game or want something warm to escape this dreary winter weather, there are other games on the market that won’t strain your eyes while playing it.

On your tail To be available on Windows computers. It will launch on Nintendo Switch in February 2025.

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