Switch

Published on March 17th, 2025 | by Nay Clark

On Your Tail Review (Switch)

Make friends and solve crimes in this casual and cozy journey about finding out who the prime suspect is while finding out a little about yourself. On Your Tail is a narrative mystery adventure game developed by Memorable Games, published by Humble Bundle, and initially released on Steam on December 16th of 2024 and has made its way to the Switch on March 13th of 2025. On Your Tail is all about exploring, talking, and deducing. The game is separated into moments of tranquility where you can freely run around the town mixed in with moments where you must investigate a crime scene to help others in need. It’s a pretty good set up to something that could be a fun time, but unfortunately, the Switch’s hardware fidelity will make you turn tail and run.

Diana Caproni, an anthropomorphic ram, is an inspiring writer who more or less just got her writing rejected by professors. A bit of motivation sets this bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young woman off to the scenic Italian seaside village of Borgo Marina to get some real life experience to help make her writing less robotic and foster more emotion. The spunky and enthusiastic Diana winds up getting involved in a burglary case with some residents of Borgo Marina and decides to help out as much as she can. One lead cascades into another mystery and turns this conundrum into something a bit more complicated. Now, fully entangled in this scandalous trail, Diana inevitably has to settle down, find a job, and make friends with the locals to resolve the fate of Borgo Marina.

The story is very down to earth and relatable. The cultural inspiration of Borgo Marina is creative and there aren’t many games with such an accurate and detailed portrayal of such a town. The environment felt like a character itself with as much running back and forth you will be doing as well as the amount of story the actual place adds to the overall narrative. Even if the story can drag on during certain bits between long moments of gameplay, it remains interesting the entire way through.

The gameplay in On Your Tail is a nice blend of life-simulation fun and detective mechanics where you have to use some brainwork to complete challenges. There are some characters in the game that you can ask to accompany you and you can then play minigames with them like skipping stones at the beach or racing marbles. If you have one of your friends follow you around, they will also comment on the dialogue of other characters when you engage with them. Finding resting spots where you can sit and relax while another character is with you, will allow you to ask them questions. Sometimes these questions will add new information to already collected information, not only making hanging out with others fun, but a good way to gain new insightful and valuable intel.

You can take on some job opportunities that will earn you some money that you can then spend on a variety of things. There are story moments in which you may need a certain amount of money to pay off something or you can buy clothes or other accessories like a bag that you can then put food items in that you can cook back at your temporary apartment room. The game is very relaxing and it feels great just to sit back and hang out in this world. The game moves at a consistent pace and has objectives that you can leisurely abide by or you may decide to just go fishing instead.

Diana is equipped with the Chronolens which helps her with her investigations. The Chronolens is a compass-like apparatus and when looked through, Diana can see the past events that transpired with whatever she is looking at. You must use this device to look for clues in your environment. After finding all of the clues in a situation, you then have to go into a deduction mode using the clues that you gathered. In this mode, you are given a little diorama that represents a scene and have to put the clues in the correct order to play the scenario out correctly. There isn’t any drawback to failing as you can just try again.

Clues, characters, collectibles, and everything else are represented as cards with all of their information on them. While trying to solve a case, you are given Joker cards and supercharging your Chronolens to activate a Joker card basically automatically aligns one of the clues in its correct spot so they are useful when you get stumped on a puzzle. While solving these challenges and letting them play out is amusing, a lot of the time they are very trial and error based since you really can’t conclude specific things given you don’t know what happened in the first place. For instance, in an early challenge, I had to set a character to move back and forth so another character wouldn’t get spotted in their line of sight, but I thought they would move for just one turn, not every other turn since one card represents one action. I then used every possible combination of the cards I had to use until I finally went with the one I didn’t think would work, but that ended up being the solution.

Overall though, every aspect of the gameplay and its mechanics keep you very involved with the game. Trying to maintain everything correctly and successfully outside of the cases as well as finding clues and watching everything play out on the gameboard sets is very fun and gratifying. The forgiving nature the game provides with its Joker card system relieves pressure and the card collecting element that’s mixed into every other aspect of the game makes On Your Tail a very addicting and satisfying experience. 

Graphically, the soft vibrant visuals and detailed world create an appropriate comfy vibe that keeps you fully invested in the story as well as just running around and doing mundane tasks. The character design is top tier and the passionate expressions are impressive. The character portraits that pop up during conversations are full of vigor and were one of my favorite parts of the game, truly giving life to the unique individuals and conveying their thoughts and quirky traits accurately and comically.

While On Your Tail is graphically magnificent, the Switch version is riddled with annoying problems like constant framerate dips and odd bloom effects that specifically affect the game’s graphics and your time playing. There is so much loading that it can be discouraging. Many times, I wanted to just turn the Switch off and quit playing because of how much loading there is. This village is meant to be fully explored with no load times in between and unfortunately, the Switch can’t keep up. Every alleyway you stride down and residence entered you are welcomed with a long session of a black loading screen. Even doing things like opening your map or going into your mind palace to look at the things you have collected are accompanied by these infuriating wait times.

As impressive and breathtaking as the game might be, the trouble it has rendering its environments is staggering. I would run into an area only to have nothing below my feet. I would stand there for a minute and watch everything slowly load in one by one. At times, the tiles would completely change textures right before my eyes. Details like graffiti on walls, cracks that separate tiled floors, and the cloth of a chair can be supremely muddied and imprecise. This may not seem like a big deal at first, but it is something that happens all throughout the game at literally every second that you play. This issue is something that cannot be ignored and explicitly comes between you and the gameplay.

There are doors you can knock on to talk to the citizens of Borgo Marina and it’s actually a big part of the game. When you are running around, sometimes these doors will have a cross over the interaction button, meaning you can’t knock on the door. At first I thought this was just a feature I haven’t unlocked yet, but I soon realized that this was happening because the door was a part of the next loading section. So I would have to keep running into the next area, let the game load properly, and then run back to the door to talk to the character on the other side without accidentally entering the last loading area. This problem really became aggravating at some points. There were a couple different times where the game never loaded any characters that I needed to talk to to progress the story until I ran into another area and ran back. You can’t progress the dialogue without waiting for the character portrait to load first and failing a case will play out a long losing animation before a longer loading screen for you to just go back to the beginning of the case to try again anyway. Often I would have to be extra cautious with my cases and make sure I could simply hit the restart button before I was about to fail so I wouldn’t have to sit there and wait to jump back in the game. On Your Tail would also frequently close due to loading errors as well.

The sound design is a quaint mix of warm and foreboding elements which perfectly relates to this seaside detective mission. Its soundtrack is relaxed, warm, and filled with easy acoustic guitar, soft jazz, and gentle piano melodies that have a seaside town feel to them, but as you delve deeper into the mystery, subtle variations in the music create tension like low bass hums, resonant sounds, and wicked but unsettling woodwind motifs which will keep your curiosity burning. Environmental sounds play a huge role in immersion. Waves gently lapping at the beach, seagulls squawking overhead, and the occasional murmur of townspeople animate the environment. Footsteps are varied depending on terrain, from sandy beaches to cobblestone streets, while interactions like searching through notes, opening doors, or the flip of a notebook are crisp and satisfying. 

On Your Tail doesn’t have voice acting, and even though I think the game could have benefited from it, the dialogue is brought to life with expressive vocal inflections; every interaction feels off the cuff, whether it‘s a banter with a trader or a furtive discussion with a suspect. Dynamic audio clues like a muted shift in instrumentation upon the discovery of a clue are engaging and guide you along their inquiry. Overall, On Your Tail produces an auditory experience both reassuring and mysterious, with each step of the journey sounding fantastic.

Final Thoughts?

On Your Tail is a refreshing game in the mammoth sea of what you normally see out in the wild west of gaming. You can easily tell that On Your Tail is a well thought out game filled with purpose and ambition. The games’ fully explored ideas and established implementation of its mechanics effortlessly sells you on its intentions. The great graphics, character designs, and other elements of the gameplay like going on dates, delivering mail, making phone calls, collecting artwork, solving riddles, and finding hidden star constellations create a game with a lot of merit. Sadly, the Switch version is just not worth anyone’s time due to uncompromisable issues that completely halt your experience making this game frustratingly unsatisfying.

About the Author

Nay Clark Gaming holds a special place in my heart and I never stop talking about video games. I really love all types of games and have an interest in games that have complicated stories and lore because I enjoy untangling the mystery of it all. When I'm not gaming, I unsuccessfully try to control three amazing and incredibly bright kids.

Related Posts

Ever 17 The Out of Infinity and Never 7 The End of Infinity Review →

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate – Casey Jones & the Junkyard Jam Switch Review →

Undying Review (Switch) →

Star Wars Episode I: Jedi Power Battles Review (Switch) →