The city has gone dark. A spark has to fix it.
That is the whole premise of TurnOn, and it is enough. Brainy Studio’s 2016 platformer stars an alien electrical spark named Turnon who crashes into a power station, comes alive from the current, and spends five episodes putting the lights back on. The game shipped June 1, 2016, on PC, Mac and Xbox One, and it carries a critic aggregate of 7.4/10 across seven outlets. That number is fair. TurnOn is a small, handsome, slightly thin game that knows exactly what it wants to be and mostly gets there.
Trailer, via Brainy Studio.
A Spark Named Turnon
The setup is simple and a little strange, which is the right combination for this kind of game. Turnon is an alien space object that flew through the atmosphere and struck the city’s power station by accident. The impact killed the grid and woke him up. He looks like a fireball with a pretty face, and he is now a rational being with a job to do.
The job is the city. Professor Brain, a scientist from the power station, finds Turnon at the scene and decides to help. The two of them travel between districts in a minibus fitted with an electric generator, moving from one dead neighborhood to the next and restoring power as they go.
That minibus is the game’s best structural idea. It turns a platformer into a road trip. Each district is a stop, each stop has its own problem, and the problems get solved in order. There is no open world and no map to get lost in. TurnOn is a game about a route.
No Platforms in the Platformer
Brainy Studio calls TurnOn a platformer without platforms, and the phrase is not just marketing. Turnon does not jump between ledges. He moves through space as a spark would, which changes how the levels read. The side-view perspective stays, but the grammar underneath it does not.
The game has two level types, and they do different work. Exploration levels are the bulk of it. Players restore the city’s power station, help a little girl get home, repair the wiring in a private cottage, throw a school party, visit an observatory and run a drone. Every chapter is full of dead circuits and dark rooms that have to be found and fixed.
Music levels are the other half. Here Turnon climbs to the high-voltage wires and moves in the rhythm of the music, collecting positive charges and avoiding negative ones. It is a rhythm game bolted to the side of an adventure game, and it works because the wires are the most natural place a spark could ever be.
The Fireball and the Professor
TurnOn does not have much cast, and it does not need much. Turnon is the entire game. He is cute in the specific way that a fireball with a face can be cute, and the visual storytelling carries his personality without dialogue doing the heavy lifting.
Professor Brain is the counterweight. He is the scientist who found Turnon and the reason the two of them have a vehicle, a plan and somewhere to be. He is not a companion in the mechanical sense. He is the frame that makes the journey make sense.
The supporting cast is the city itself. A little girl who needs to get home. A school that needs a party. A cottage with bad wiring. An observatory that has gone quiet. These are small, ordinary problems, and the game treats them as worth solving.
What Brainy Studio Built Before and After
TurnOn was Brainy Studio’s second big project, built on Unity3D after WitchCraft. The studio’s ambitions were visible before the game shipped. A prototype of TurnOn won the Games category at Imagine Cup 2014, the technology competition held under the auspices of Microsoft, and it was also a participant in AppCampus, a support program for mobile apps and games developers.
The first of five announced episodes launched at the beginning of 2015. The developers then started a Steam Greenlight campaign. By the time the full game arrived on June 1, 2016, the episode structure was in place and the five-chapter shape was the plan from the start.
That history matters when you play it. TurnOn feels like a game that was designed in pieces and then assembled, because it was. The episodes are not a marketing gimmick layered on top of a finished product. They are the product’s skeleton, and you can feel the joints.
Two Kinds of Levels, Two Kinds of Play
The split between exploration and music levels is the clearest way to see what TurnOn is doing, and it is also where the game is most uneven. Here is how the two compare.
| Exploration levels | Music levels | |
|---|---|---|
| Core activity | Restore power, fix wiring, solve the chapter’s problem | Climb high-voltage wires, move to the rhythm |
| Goal | Turn the lights back on | Collect positive charges, avoid negative ones |
| Examples | Power station, girl’s trip home, cottage wiring, school party, observatory, drone | Wire sections built around the soundtrack |
| Feel | Adventure and puzzle work | Rhythm and reflex work |
| Role in the game | The bulk of the running time | The change of pace |
The exploration levels carry the story. They are where Professor Brain matters, where the minibus matters, and where the city gets its lights back one district at a time. The music levels carry the energy. They are shorter, sharper, and they ask something different of your hands.
The problem is that the two halves do not always feel like the same game. Exploration levels are patient. Music levels are not. Switching between them is a jolt, and not always a welcome one.
A Soothing Soundtrack and a Colorful Blackout
The presentation is where TurnOn earns most of its goodwill. The art style is charming and the world is incredibly colorful and detailed, which is a strange thing to say about a game set during a blackout. But the darkness is the canvas, not the mood. When the lights come back on, the color comes with them.
The soundtrack is soothing and magical, and it does more than set a tone. In the music levels, it is the mechanic. You move to it. You collect to it. The score is not decoration on top of the play. It is the thing the play is built around.
Visual storytelling does a lot of the work that dialogue would do in a bigger game. Turnon’s personality comes through in how he moves and how the world reacts to him. The game is not trying to be clever about this. It is trying to be warm, and it succeeds.
Where the Spark Falters
TurnOn is not a hard game and it is not a long one. Five episodes, two level types, one character and a minibus. The scope is honest, but it is also the limit. Players who want systems to master or challenges to grind will find the game thin.
The episode structure leaves seams. Each chapter is a self-contained problem, and the connective tissue between them is mostly the minibus ride. The city is a route, not a place, and after five stops you have seen what the game has to show you.
The platformer-without-platforms idea is genuinely distinctive, but it also removes a tool. Without platforms, the level design has fewer ways to create tension. The exploration levels lean on puzzle work and the music levels lean on rhythm, and neither has much room to escalate.
None of this is a failure. It is a choice, and Brainy Studio made it deliberately. TurnOn is a game about restoring something small and ordinary, and it is built at the scale of the thing it is about.
The Verdict on TurnOn
TurnOn is worth playing, and the 7.4/10 aggregate is the right number. It is a beautiful, gentle, slightly uneven game that does one thing no one else was doing in 2016 and does it with care.
The parts that matter most are the ones that are hardest to copy. The soundtrack is not a feature, it is a mechanic. The visual storytelling carries a character who never speaks. The minibus turns a platformer into a journey with a beginning and an end. Those are real achievements for a studio’s second big project.
The parts that hold it back are structural. Two level types that do not quite mesh. Five episodes that feel assembled rather than grown. A platformer that removed its platforms and did not fully replace what they were for. The game is more charming than it is challenging, and more memorable than it is deep.
What sticks with you is the ending idea. TurnOn makes the world the way it was before, but a little better and kinder. That is a small ambition, and the game meets it. A spark flies into a power station, kills the lights, and spends five episodes giving them back. The city ends up where it started, plus one friend.
That is not nothing. It is just not everything.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
