On Your Tail

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

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Review:

On Your Tail is a family-friendly Graphic Adventure released in 2024 on PC and ported in 2025 to Nintendo Switch. Set in a world of “furry” anthropomorphic animal people, On Your Tail puts you in the role of Diana, an Italian student and aspiring writer who takes to heart her teacher’s advice that while her writing is technically sound, it lacks emotion fueled by real-life experience. Inspired by her grandmother’s stories of the small coastal town of Borgo Marina, Diana sets out to find this town, only to discover it beset by a string of puzzling thefts. Seeing this as just the kick she needs to bring passion to her writing, Diana takes it upon herself to solve these mysteries.

As you play through the game, it quickly becomes apparent that Borgo Marina is a character unto itself, its inelegant mazelike streets and alleys and jumbled-together houses making this place feel old and lived-in, and supporting the idea that this town is a community where everyone likely knows everyone else. As you explore the town and meet its people, you’ll meet plenty of interesting characters there too, like the retired professor who helps you out after a disastrous crash on your Vespi (can’t have players using a name-brand Vespa, after all), the impatient inventor, and the kindly beachside coffee shop proprietor, all with their own unique personalities.

Some of these characters have interesting interpersonal relationships with each other, and some you can befriend yourself, with them optionally tagging along as a helper character to assist with some interactions. You’ll also find occasional minigames to play.

However, the meat of the gameplay here, apart from running errands back and forth across town for various characters, are the mysteries themselves, and there are a few steps in solving these. One of these steps involves looking around the environment using a “chronolens” tool that lets you peer into the past to see what has changed, while the other involves arranging the events of a mystery in a proper order to deduce what happened. Players are given a limited number of “Joker cards” that act as a hint system for these two steps, which give players an out if they get stuck, but encourage players to hold off on using them to save them for later if they can.

The presentation here is gorgeous, with a huge caveat that I’ll get to in a moment. The “furry” character designs are lovely, with really expressive characters in a somewhat cartoony art style that looks great both in static 2D portraits during conversations, as well as in 3D. The world of Borgo Marina is bright and colorful, with tons of detail around the area really making the place look alive with its own personality and history, and with some nice lighting and water effects, all while remaining true to the game’s slightly-cartoony style.

These visuals are backed by a relaxed instrumental soundtrack and joined by characters who grunt and make other non-linguistic noises during text conversations, which is a tad disappointing but I suppose it’s not surprising in a game that’s this dialogue-heavy.

When it comes to complaints, I do have some issues with the game being obtuse with its goals, and occasionally wasting a player’s time with a lot of tedious busywork and running around from point A to point B. However, these issues come secondary to the main issue this game has, and it’s that caveat I mentioned a moment ago: this game is a technical nightmare on Nintendo Switch.

You’ll find the framerates frequently dropping, tons of glaring ugly pop-in, some objects rendered at shockingly low resolution compared to their surroundings, some moments where the game briefly stops, and multiple times while playing this game I had to deal with game-crashing bugs. The game even has an “Unstick Player” option in the game menus, as if the game’s creators either couldn’t be bothered or couldn’t figure out how to deal with the bugs and just shrugged their shoulders, slapped a Band-Aid option in the game menus, and shoved the game out onto the eShop in an incomplete state.

I haven’t gotten to the worst of it, though – the loading times. Loading times in On Your Tail are frequent and long, and absolutely kill the pacing of this game. One early-game task that has you walking from the aforementioned professor’s house to the inventor’s workshop in the dock has you winding your way through town, and while it’s mostly contiguous, you’ll have the game freeze and pop up a loading icon a half-dozen times, in addition to the 3 times you’ll need to open doors to enter/exit one place and get to another.

On Your Tail aims for a relaxed, cozy vibe, but it’s hard to let yourself become immersed in that relaxed vibe when you’re constantly surrounded by technical issues, performance issues, and loading screen after loading screen. Persistent players may still find the positives here worth putting up with these negatives, but I highly recommend that if this game interests you, you should play it on another platform instead. Oh, on that note, read farther down for my thoughts on the game playing on Nintendo Switch 2…

tl;dr – On Your Tail is a family-friendly Graphic Adventure game set in a “furry” version of Italy that puts you in the role of an aspiring writer solving mysteries in the small coastal town of Borgo Marina. There’s a lot of character here, a wonderful presentation, and a fantastic cozy vibe… that is absolutely ruined by horrible technical and performance issues, and tons of tedious loading screens that make it hard to appreciate this game’s good elements. If you want to play this game, I highly recommend you play it on a platform other than Nintendo Switch.

Grade: C

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The Nintendo Switch 2 Difference

On Your Tail

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

The moment I started encountering the nasty performance issues On Your Tail suffers from on Nintendo Switch, I immediately found myself wondering how the game would perform on Nintendo Switch 2. This curiosity was put into overdrive when I checked the game’s options menus and discovered that there are numerous options to improve the graphics at the cost of performance – unlocking the framerates, improving the visuals, and even messing around with anti-aliasing options. This calls for some investigating!

I found one thing remains the same right off the bat, though – this is still a very buggy game. The very first time I fired it up, it not only crashed, but it made my Nintendo Switch 2 dock stop recognizing my TV. I was seriously worried that my dock was fried, as it was interacting with my Nintendo Switch 2 very strangely, but when I saw it had the power light on even without the Nintendo Switch 2 in it, I unplugged it and plugged it back in, which fixed the issue.

Not a promising start.

However, after loading up the game successfully the second time and heading into the options menus to turn all of those graphics options to the max, the result was like playing a Nintendo Switch 2 Edition of On Your Tail that was built right into the Nintendo Switch version of the game. The jump in framerates is massive, silky-smooth, and suffers none of the slowdown that I encountered on Nintendo Switch. The graphical presentation looked much nicer too, with an overall smoother-looking world. I also noticed that the pop-in and texture pop-in was mostly gone here too.

But possibly an even bigger change here is the loading times. Loading the game up takes 55 seconds on Nintendo Switch, but only 24 seconds on Nintendo Switch 2. Loading a save drops down from 16 seconds to 5 seconds. However, the biggest change is that all of those loading times as you wander around town are either reduced or removed completely. Some spots that brought up the loading icon and froze the game for a bit on Nintendo Switch don’t stop at all here. And even when the loading icon does pop up, it’s there for a much shorter amount of time.

Just to give you an idea, I timed how long it took me to make a trip from one side of town to another, working my way via the winding labyrinthine paths of the village. On Nintendo Switch, this trip took 3 minutes 28 seconds. On Nintendo Switch 2, it took me 2 minutes 18 seconds. Yeah, Nintendo Switch 2 just shaved 1/3 of the time off of that walk. And given how many times you’ll be cris-crossing back and forth in this game, that is an absolute game-changer.

There are still problems here. Some of the textures still look very ugly, the camera can be oddly jerky at times, and you’ll find that every now and then the game will freeze for a fraction of a second, just enough to notice and be off-putting.

So in the end, Nintendo Switch 2 can’t stop a terribly buggy game from being buggy, but it does massively improve the performance, taking it from an almost unplayable state due to frustrating loading times to something far more reasonable. If you want to play this game on a Nintendo platform, trust me when I say that you absolutely want to play it on Nintendo Switch 2, because the difference here is like night and day.

tl;dr – On Your Tail is a family-friendly Graphic Adventure game set in a “furry” version of Italy that puts you in the role of an aspiring writer solving mysteries in the small coastal town of Borgo Marina. There’s a lot of character here, a wonderful presentation, and a fantastic cozy vibe… and also some worrisome bugs that plague the game. However, this is still an absolutely massive improvement over the way the game runs on Nintendo Switch, with improvements to graphics, framerates, and a huge reduction of loading times. While it’s still far from a perfect game, on Nintendo Switch 2 the flaws are actually tolerable, and I think players looking for a cozy detective game should give this a consideration.

Grade: B-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2025 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best Free Nintendo Switch 2 Game Upgrade

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