Sandbox sleuthing with a coastal Italian flavour
Developer Memorable Games
Publisher Humble Games
Format PC, Switch
Origin Italy
Release 2024
From a curious deer in Beacon Pines to a raccoon PI in Backbone – and not forgetting, of course, everyone’s favourite amphibious investigator, Frog Detective – animals solving videogame crimes is becoming something of a trend. Perhaps they’re simply better at it. In the case of Memorable Games’ narrative adventure, it’s a chamois journalist, Diana, who’s tasked with solving a string of mysteries in the fictional Italian coastal village of Borgo Marina – a veritable hotbed of creature criminality.
Borgo Marina represents Italy at its most picturesque and idyllic. “We really wanted to make a game that is unapologetically Italian,” creative director Mauro Fanelli tells us. “A version of Italy filled with the most Italian, most relaxing activities, and the charm of the Italy of our youth.”
To this end, everything in On Your Tail’s compact open world, from its architecture to its vegetation – and, naturally, its food – is authentically Italian. Budding linguists might even learn a phrase or two. Fanelli stresses, however, that, for all the pastoral splendour of its setting, On Your Tail isn’t your average ‘cosy’ game. As becomes clear when he outlines one of the game’s key influences. “This might sound weird, but one of our biggest inspirations was actually the Yakuza series,” he says. “When you play it, you get a really good sense for Tokyo as a location and all the things you can do there, but you’re still playing a pretty dramatic game.” In the portion we play, there’s little evidence of what Fanelli says will be quite a “heavy” story at times, but we get the opportunity to test our deductive skills. Mama Lucia, the owner of a local restaurant, has noticed a break-in, but she’s both unsure if anything was taken and, if so, how. You survey the restaurant both with the naked eye and the help of a ‘chrono lens’, a monocle-like item that allows you to look into the past. When we train the lens on a messy cupboard, it reveals that the arrangement of items within was much more orderly not long ago; in other words, someone has recently been rifling through it. Clues scattered around the room aren’t necessarily easy to spot, because it’s not always immediately clear whether individual items represent anything out of the ordinary – deliberately so, in order to not make these investigations too straightforward.
From clues unearthed to knowledge gl
