On Your Tail™ Steam Charts & Stats

If you draw a ven diagram with adventure game, life simulator, and visual novel, On Your Tail is somewhere right in the middle. Think of it as Shenmue meets Animal Crossing. It's not a particularly challenging game but what it does offer is an immense sense of comfort while playing it from how warm and pleasant everything about it feels. If what you're craving is something to relax and unwind with before you go to bed or after a stressful day, that's exactly the kind of niche On Your Tail falls into. If you enjoy Nintendo games the aesthetic and mood of the game will feel instantly familiar, with a lovingly crafted world full of colorful and likable characters. That all is not to say the game is without flaws, and some of them are inherited from the games it draws inspiration from. Like Shenmue, there is no way to quickly travel around the game's village, and you will have to familiarize yourself with the georgraphy. There is an in game map, but it's not super detailed and you will have to check it frequently as you explore the town. You're also going to have to rely on a lot of street name signs for certain parts of the game, which again, is something this game inherits from Shenmue. Finding your away around town is neither fast or intuitive and that's likely to frustrate some people, but I also feel like if they added fast travel if would rob the player from being able to fully enjoy the town and learn how to travel it as if they were visiting their themselves, so it's a bit of a tossup as to whether or not it's a problem that could be remedied well. Ultimately, whether or not you enjoy this game is going to come down to how much you like the characters and vibes of the game. If you think the characters look adorable and the village looks like somewhere you'd like to spend a lot of time in, you're probably going to like it. I can tell a lot of heart and passion went into this game and that they had a lot of genuine love for the characters they were making, and I think that's commendable. *UPDATE* Having finished the game (not a 100% playthrough but I got maximum relationship status for all the friends), I have a few additional thoughts to add. I will try to convey my feelings without going into spoilers, but just in case you've been warned. First of all, I somewhat rescind my prior statement on fast travel. In the early hours I didn't really see the problem but about halfway through my playthrough, walking from one end of the village to the next only to get turned around accidentally every other minute became more frustrating than it was immersive. I think being able to fast travel between the major hubs and Diana's apartment would be a great QOL feature that would save the player a lot of time and frustration without sacrificing too much, because the amount of times I had to run from one end of the map to the other was very tiring later in the game. I also think the player marker on the map should have a directional indicator, because that would help with navigation a lot. There were also a few frustrating puzzles in the game, although some of that came down to me being too stubborn to ask the game for hints when I should have. The hint system is perfectly useable and there's not really a lot of disincentive against using it, even though you might think there is when you first start playing. Now, without going into too much spoilers, the game has a bittersweet ending, perhaps a bit too bitter for some people's liking. I don't want to second guess the writers or what kind of message they wanted to leave the player with, but I was not expecting my cute anthro vacation mystery game to leave me with questions that give me existential dread. The game does have a brief endgame period to finish your playthrough and complete several additional quest sections but having that hanging over my head the whole time was a major vibe shift. I think there are some ways they could have come down a bit more gently, but I'm an audience member, not the storyteller, so make of that what you will. I also felt like the game was setting up for Diana's grandmother and the Chronolens to be intertwined with the story, but the game kind of forgets about it. Ultimately, Diana's adventure isn't for learning about her grandma, so that may come across as a bit of a red herring. The romantic subplots in also don't really pay off at all until near the end or during the endgame, and there isn't really that much payoff so don't get too excited if that's what you're looking forward to. Which is kind of a shame, because the way the relationships in the game are written feel very sincere and the friendship system is for the most part handled pretty well. One last thing I want to discuss is the bugs. There were a few times in the game where it was running but the hud was missing and my controls were locked, so I had to quit and restart. There are also a lot of bugs in the cooking sections which was disappointing, since they are fun but they become very frustrating when various scripts break during them. Overall, I still give this game a very posiitve recommendation and I think if you're curious about it, it's probably worth your time. Just beware that it's got some pacing issues, and regardless of whether or not the ending is your cup of tea, I hope it at least makes you feel something.

Personally, I love the game. The characters are cute and the story is enjoyable. Its mostly vibes/feelings and enjoying the italian scenery and that is exactly what I was looking for. The style for the deductions is pretty unique and I enjoy it. There is not stake to do them wrong, you can do them as many time as you need and you can buy extra joker cards (with in game money, no extra cost). I have a few issues and bugs and the developers respond quickly and were very helpful! I only wish I could see the things I bought better in the house. (fix some words)

Expensive things I buy for my home don't appear. My progress with the gelato does not save correctly. A charming little game, but still riddled with frustrating little bugs.

I really wanted to like this game, but the gameplay does not live up to the quality of the visuals. I expected a detective game and instead I got a life sim - with your staples: cooking, farming, and fishing - that happens to have a detective storyline with an intended "guess randomly until you're right" logic system instead of deductive reasoning. But even the visuals are misleading because there's translation issues and bugs such as cards not loading, screen cutoffs, and the nail in the coffin: the game hung on a loading screen when I called a friend over the phone

The graphics are beautiful, but the game can be so incredibly frustrating at times. It's impossible to get out of certain tasks, such as cooking, until you complete them successfully. Some of the cooking tasks seem to fail no matter what I do, like the game fails to recognize that I'm moving the controls. The game is rather buggy in places, and if the game crashes or you have to kill the process, the next time you start the game it loads on the wrong screen, and moving it back to the correct screen is very difficult. I hate Steam's Yes/No binary for recommendations. I really wish this game had a star rating system, because I'd give it 3 stars out of 5. It might be fine for someone with more patience than me, but I'm not sure I'm going to finish it.

TLDR - If you like slice-of-life adventures, gorgeous scenery, furries, and lots of minigames then this game might be for you. Be prepared for some money grinding and some minor bugs (non-game-breaking). Expect 25+ hours of gameplay. ===== On Your Tail is an ultimate summer vacation game: you're a down-on-your-luck aspiring author who needs to get away from it all and winds up in a stunning coastal town where something nefarious is afoot, mysteries abound, and as the outsider-looking-in it's up to you to get to the bottom of it all and close the case. When you're not busy sleuthing it up you're busy meeting strangers, doing various odd-jobs to earn spending money, and enjoying a scenic italian coastline with the friends you make along the way. Now to get real: if you think the mystery-solving detective half of the above paragraph was the core of the game you'd be partially wrong. While it is the main story of the game it only encompasses about a third of the total time you spend in the game itself. The other two-thirds of the game, at least for completionists, is collecting all of the in-game cards, which requires spending lots and lots and LOTS of money, which requires grinding money via mini-games on a level you'd expect from a JRPG. Don't get me wrong, the mini-games are fairly solid in and of themselves, but for those who don't enjoy grinding it will get old really fast. Even if you just want to complete a deck of cards, like Fishing, you're going to be at it for a fair bit and praying that RNG will look favorably on you. And make no mistake, you WILL need to grind out for a while, because even if you're just in it to do all the cute social stuff you're going to have to spend money at some point. The devs, in making a chill game, made a surprisingly grindy game. Putting that aside though, everything else about On Your Tail is pretty masterfully crafted: the characters (which are all furry) are well-designed and well-written, the worldspace strikes a balance between realistic and convenient (even if it doesn't always feel that way), and there really is a lot to see and do when you're not working on the main story or trying to figure out how to pay for that one ingredient you're missing. The entire setting is downright charming, which is why I originally bought this game. The only other downside is that there are outstanding bugs that need to be addressed, like the occasional glitching geometry and how certain cards just do not unlock, but fortunately these only break immersion and not the game itself. There's also a lack of replayability, which is in part because the devs intended for you to 100% the game in a single save file and wrote the story accordingly. Once you get everything and finish the game that's really it, unless you want to go back and walk around in a different outfit. But even with the mind-numbing minigame grinding and other shortcomings mentioned above, these are cons that are outweighed by a simple-enough and well-made game that is clearly the product of devs that threw themselves into it. I wouldn't blame anyone for waiting for it to go on sale, but sooner or later it is worth your time if you like games in a more wholesome flavor.