On Your Tail

I went in expecting a lightweight mystery to knock out over a weekend, and Borgo Marina had other plans entirely. On Your Tail is part life simulation, part card-based detective puzzler, and part slow-burn relationship builder set in a fictional Italian coastal village that the Italy-based Memorable Games team built with obvious affection for Ligurian Cinque Terre. You play as Diana Caproni, an anthropomorphic goat writer who arrives on vacation, crashes her Vispa scooter, and immediately gets pulled into a string of mysterious thefts. The setup is slight, but the world underneath it is genuinely dense. The core gameplay loop splits cleanly into two modes. During your downtime in Borgo Marina, you wander the town without a minimap or waypoints, pulling up a labelled map the old-fashioned way to find your next destination. You can take shifts at the local gelateria, wait tables at a restaurant, run mail deliveries using just a name and a vague address, go fishing, race marbles with friends, or spend an evening hunting star constellations with the camera a character named Paun gifts you early on. Building friendships with four key companions unlocks dedicated activity chains and even mechanical benefits: Chea will repair and eventually upgrade Diana's fishing rod, for instance. These side loops are where the game earns the bulk of its goodwill, and players who let themselves sink into the rhythm of Borgo Marina will clock far more hours than the main story strictly requires. The detective side is where the consensus frays. Diana carries a Chronolens inherited from her grandmother, a device that lets her see how a location or object used to look in the past. You use it to comb crime scenes for clues, each of which becomes a card. Once you have a full hand, you enter a board-game-style deduction phase and reconstruct the order of events by arranging those event cards correctly. Early cases are forgiving, with a Joker card hint system keeping things accessible. By the later third of the game, the card counts swell and the logical connective tissue between clues thins out, pushing the experience closer to structured trial-and-error than genuine deduction. Critics were divided sharply here: some found the escalating complexity engaging, others found it a source of genuine frustration. My read is that players who enjoy the process of narrowing possibilities over multiple attempts will tolerate it fine; those expecting something closer to Return of the Obra Dinn-style airtight logic should dial expectations back. Visually, the PC version is a strong argument for the developers' craft. The 3D environments and 2D character portrait art both carry a richness that consistently punches above indie budget, and the soundtrack shifts intelligently between a breezy vacation score and a more tense, procedural tone when you are working a case. On the technical side, the PC version launched in a mostly solid state, well ahead of the Switch port which drew significantly harsher criticism for performance problems. If you are on PC, those concerns largely do not apply. The achievement list is 45 entries deep, none missable, with a clean overview of remaining collectibles built into the game itself. A completion run targeting every friendship level, mini-game tier, and collectable card sits comfortably in the 30-40 hour range. The mystery at the center of Borgo Marina ends up being bigger than the phantom-thief framing suggests, folding in the history of a fire at Villa Fidato and a town that may have been stuck in time longer than anyone admits. Whether that payoff lands depends heavily on how much the daily life loop has invested you in the cast by the time the final cards hit the table.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

Be the first to comment on On Your Tail.