On Your Tail: A Summer Vacation Gone Wrong

On Your Tail is a tough one for me. I truly enjoy the summer vacation vibes of the game, the town of Borgo Marina is absolutely beautiful, every character design is on point. I could spend hours wandering the streets, knocking on doors, speaking with people.

I especially like the companion characters, who you take on strolls about town and who become genuine friends with the main character, Diana. In my time with the game I only really spent a significant amount of time with Paun and Chea, both of whom are introduced to you on the first day, but both are a delight (even if spending time with Chea can be confusing, as she’s angry with you in the story for accusing her of a crime but during hangouts she’s chipper and flirty). They open up to you in pretty natural ways and the friendship feels real.

Unfortunately, most of the game is outright bad. The main thrust of the game is the detective role Diana takes on upon her arrival in the village, and while the first couple aren’t too bad, it quickly becomes a guessing game. I found myself in more than of the deduction puzzles using a Joker card to reveal what happened first just to have an actual starting point, as it becomes impossible just a few puzzles in to figure out where to start. Or, maybe the starting point is obvious, but so many things happened afterward in what seems like an arbitrary order that piecing them together without help drives me insane. And all that is before I got to the mystery I quit on reaching, where Diana literally has to guess something happened before starting the deduction phase, and even if you ordered everything correctly, if you didn’t make the correct guess, then you’ll still fail to solve the puzzle.

The rest of the game doesn’t fare much better. The least offensive are the fishing minigame, which is easy to the point I wonder why there are mechanics at all, and the waitress minigame, which ramps up difficulty in a nice progression but maxes out before it really reaches a point I’d call fun. But really, I can’t complain too much about those. Again, this game gives chill summer vacation vibes, so anything too difficult or punishing. Which is why there are a couple of minigames I simply cannot abide.

The first is Chea’s toolbox sorting. This one is difficult not due to any mechanics, but due to a problem pervasive throughout the entire game: an absolutely abysmal translation. In the rest of the game, this usually just leaves jokes falling flat or a somewhat confusing interaction between characters. With Chea’s toolbox, you are sorting the items based on a set of instructions given to you by Chea, and the poor translation results in her outright lying to you in at least one instance (she says that every item comes from the shelf above the last item in one riddle I found; the actually solution was the shelf below). This was the one portion of the game where I had to actually look up what to do because after the first two riddles, they become so impossibly obtuse.

The other is honestly far more upsetting, as cooking with a friend is supposed to be a relaxing way to spend the time and hang out with your bestie. Cooking in this game drives me up a wall. Any time I have to push the right stick down and then bring it back up when the meter reaches a certain little white box I find myself cursing and gritting my teeth. It’s just not good, and it shouldn’t be as difficult to nail as it is. Even with the number of mistakes you’re allowed to make, I failed so many times at the recipe I was trying to cook with Chea. It was rough.

Finally, I don’t know how this game plays on a PC, but it was Steam Deck verified and I just got a new shiny Steam Deck, so that’s what I played On Your Tail on. Horrendous. The game lags heavily every time you transition from one area of town to another, or any time you run for too long and you start to get the wind effect on the screen. It makes an otherwise easy traversal a start-and-stop fight as you, I suppose, wait for the next area to load to ease the burden of the game so you can run without intense lag again, or you’ll wait around at your destination for several seconds before being able to actually hold or press the A button to interact with anything. I’ve also found that if I approach a character or object too quickly or from the wrong direction or whatever it’s taking issue with at the moment, the game will simply not load in the button prompt to interact  correctly, or it will load and then disappear and I’d have to walk away and reapproach to try and get it to work properly. This happened all the time, and started basically as soon as I entered Borgo Marina proper.

All this to say that On Your Tail is an incredibly frustrating experience I cannot possibly recommend anyone to play, at least in its current state. The world is beautiful and full of color and memorable characters, even minor ones you only interact with through a door, like the former mail delivery person with no intention of returning to their job or the two nuns, young and old, with wildly different personalities. But there are far too many frustrations, mistranslations, and poor design choices to say suffering through them would be worth your time. There are better vacations out to be had, even if, like Diana’s grandmother, I’ll at least remember the wonder of Borgo Marina.