I wanted to like this game. A lot. I loved the art style a lot. The animations had a little bit of jank to them, but that just added to the charm for me.

The gameplay held me back though. Making a fun platformer is about good level design, good camera control and the controls feeling right. TurnOn doesn't exceed at any of these and it ends up making the entire experience worse off for it.

TurnOn has mostly okay level design except for a few areas where you have to do blind faith jumps because the only way to progress is to jump to an offscreen rope. The game often has no indicator of these so enjoy sometimes blindly jumping to your death. The camera control is bad... or rather there is no camera control. The camera is hard locked to your character so you can't just test to see if it's a blind faith jump and airstrafe back. Despite there being no punishment for jumping to your death, this does make this part of the game incredibly tedious, especially for the 4-5 second respawn animation and it teleporting you back to the last checkpoint. The gameplay works on a 2d plane, however there can be multiple 2d planes for you to jump between in a single level. This can work in the game and sometimes it's pretty novel, but for the most part you'll probably find it incredibly annoying. The camera will flick up and the scenery will move in an attempt to get you to hook onto the scene behind -- even if it isn't possible for you to successfully make the jump. This will make jumping for the collectibles annoying, but it will also make you try and jump up to an area that may not be accessible at all.

As a causal platformer, these issues would be annoying, but just an annoyance on an otherwise enjoyable game, right? Well that's until you play the annoying auto run levels. These appear to be synced up to the music, but it's done very poorly. Instead enjoy a lot of trial and error and hearing the same part of the song as you unsuccessfully try and make your way through. At first it's a neat gimmick, but the game continues to throw them at you.

Ugh. I really don't want to rate this game down. I don't feel good about it, but I cannot recommend this in good earnest. What a shame.

I wanted to like this game. A lot. I loved the art style a lot. The animations had a little bit of jank to them, but that just added to the charm for me. The gameplay held me back though. Making a fun platformer is about good level design, good camera control and the controls feeling right. TurnOn doesn't exceed at any of these and it ends up making the entire experience worse off for it. TurnOn has mostly okay level design except for a few areas where you have to do blind faith jumps because the only way to progress is to jump to an offscreen rope. The game often has no indicator of these so enjoy sometimes blindly jumping to your death. The camera control is bad... or rather there is no camera control. The camera is hard locked to your character so you can't just test to see if it's a blind faith jump and airstrafe back. Despite there being no punishment for jumping to your death, this does make this part of the game incredibly tedious, especially for the 4-5 second respawn animation and it teleporting you back to the last checkpoint. The gameplay works on a 2d plane, however there can be multiple 2d planes for you to jump between in a single level. This can work in the game and sometimes it's pretty novel, but for the most part you'll probably find it incredibly annoying. The camera will flick up and the scenery will move in an attempt to get you to hook onto the scene behind -- even if it isn't possible for you to successfully make the jump. This will make jumping for the collectibles annoying, but it will also make you try and jump up to an area that may not be accessible at all. As a causal platformer, these issues would be annoying, but just an annoyance on an otherwise enjoyable game, right? Well that's until you play the annoying auto run levels. These appear to be synced up to the music, but it's done very poorly. Instead enjoy a lot of trial and error and hearing the same part of the song as you unsuccessfully try and make your way through. At first it's a neat gimmick, but the game continues to throw them at you. Ugh. I really don't want to rate this game down. I don't feel good about it, but I cannot recommend this in good earnest. What a shame.