Power On is the rotation puzzle in its plainest form. A source sits somewhere on the grid, lamps sit elsewhere, and between them is a field of wire tiles pointing the wrong way. Tap a tile, it turns a quarter turn. Keep going until everything is connected.

Infinity Games, Lda has built two of these and this is the more deliberately relaxed. The Play listing describes it as an anti-stress game and that is an accurate description rather than marketing — the problem is that being restful and being interesting turn out to pull in different directions.

The first ten minutes

The opening boards are four cells square with two lamps, and they solve themselves. You cannot really fail; you can only take slightly longer than necessary. For somebody who has never played a rotation puzzle it is a kind introduction.

The trouble is how long the kindness lasts. Thirty boards in I was still solving by tapping every tile until it looked right, because nothing had yet punished that approach. A puzzle that never makes brute force expensive never teaches you to stop using it.

Taps, drags and reach

One gesture: tap a tile, it rotates ninety degrees clockwise. There is no counter-clockwise option, no drag-to-rotate and no undo, because none of those are needed when a full rotation costs four taps and nothing is being counted.

Tap targets are generous and the response immediate, with a small animation that reads clearly without slowing you down. Mechanically this is well built; there is simply very little of it.

How long a sitting actually lasts

Three to ten minutes covers most sittings, and boards are short enough that you will usually finish the one you are on rather than abandon it. Progress saves anyway.

It suits the specific case of wanting to do something with your hands while thinking about something else — a real use, and one this catalogue serves well. Just do not expect the session to end because the game got hard.

Board readability and art direction

Flat colour on a dark board with a clear glow along the live sections, so at any moment you can see exactly how far the current has travelled. That live-path feedback is the best thing in the package and does most of the work of making progress feel good.

The palette leans on colour alone to distinguish tile types, with no secondary shape cue, and later boards change colour scheme without changing anything else. On the larger boards, with several lamp colours in play, that is a real accessibility gap the settings do not address.

Offline behaviour

Fully offline, small install, no account, no launch handshake. Boards load from the device and progress is kept locally.

The hint system is the only thing that behaves differently without a connection, and even that degrades quietly rather than blocking. As a flight or tunnel game it does everything asked of it.

Depth after the first week

Very little, and the game knows it. Once you understand that a rotation puzzle is solved by working outward from the source rather than inward from the lamps, every remaining board is the same board at a larger size.

That is a legitimate design for a stress-relief application and a weak one for a puzzle. Energy: Anti-Stress Loops reaches for exactly the same calm and gets there while still posing a question; Powerline takes the identical gesture and makes it cost something. This one mostly just removes the question, and it is the entry here I would install last.

Three frames from the game

What works, and what does not

The verdict

A competent, calm, completely undemanding rotation puzzle. If you specifically want something to occupy your hands without occupying your head, it does that honestly. If you want to be asked a question, the other six all ask better ones.

Scores on this site run from 6.1 to 8.7 and are one person’s judgement. How the scoring works.