Teppo and The Secret Ancient City (Nintendo Switch) – The test

Teppo and The Secret Ancient City was released on February 1, 2024 for €7.99 on the eShop of the Nintendo Switch. It was developed and published by 7 Raven Studios, the studio has existed since 2006 and is located in New York in the USA. The founder created games on the Commodore 64, but this is not the 1^time times they make games for Nintendo like on the Game Boy Advance with Word Safari: The Friendship Totems in 2007.

Is there a story? I forgot

Teppo, an adventurer, hears about a mysterious stone fortress after meeting the mysterious Tanaca Wanax, the last chief of the Ugha Lulala tribe who tells you the story of his tribe. Tanaca's tribe used gems to pass through portals leading to other dimensions. After hearing this story, Teppo sets out to find the stone fortress in the Amazon jungle.

The story is much longer and much more “complicated” when told in-game, but hey you'll immediately forget about the storyline since it's non-existent until the end of the game.

Teppo the adventurer drowned in a very basic platformer

Teppo is controlled like any other platformer with a double jump, a throw/shoot of his equipped weapon and lever actuations. There is nothing really to note about his arsenal, it looks like any classic platformer and it does not change during the adventure. You start with 4 life points in the form of hearts and several lives accompanied by a gem counter.

You can get 2 other weapons besides the boomerang: a bomb that throws in an arc and a rifle with limited bullets that shoots straight. The weapons are only used to kill enemies and not to solve “puzzles” since the latter boil down to finding the red key, then the blue key or activating the Y lever.

You will encounter various traps, again nothing notable to note, in addition to that certain elements placed in the foreground will hinder you from seeing them and it makes the experience frustrating by an ultra cheap level design.

The enemies are nothing special with patterns going from left to right or from top to bottom for the most part. To kill them you either jump on them (even if they have spikes on their heads) or hit them with one of your weapons.

The biggest problem is that killing an enemy means they respawn in 2-3 seconds and this makes some passages very frustrating when you go through the same place several times, which happens more often than you would like.

Large, empty levels

The levels are big, long and quite repetitive. You will regularly find places that are a little too similar and they will be filled with gems that are mandatory to move on to the next level (for example getting 430/500 gems).

Especially since important objects (such as a key) are scattered throughout these large levels and progression is slow, since Teppo does not have an extravagant arsenal of moves, nothing helps him move faster.

The many checkpoints will help a little, but if you die, you return to a checkpoint adding an additional slowness that we could do without having to endure.

There will be a few levels with a minecart phase where you have to avoid the void and spikes, but it lacks variety and fun.

Quality pixel art and very well-used lighting effects

The pixel art is pretty successful overall, with a pixel in the foreground that is detailed enough to understand what we're seeing (except for the traps).

It comes with a background that repeats itself depending on the area, but it is relatively remarkable especially since the whole game has the luxury of lighting effects that greatly improve the quality of the pixel arts. On the other hand, small bugs have been noted such as a place filled with water invisible to the naked eye while the waterfalls are visible and the physics of water is present.

The animations are minimal, but some enemies use “special attacks” without their animation changing, and an attack that comes out of nowhere will probably hit you. After some will have an attack animation, but it remains very simplistic.

Generic music.mp3

The music is background noise overall, it doesn't leave a mark and yet it's what you hear the most in the game. There's almost no sound design, the actions performed aren't striking and a big wagon that makes a shaking effect when falling makes almost no noise.

It's long, but not for the right reasons

The levels are long because they are huge to go through, it generally takes 20 minutes doing the minimum for long corridors with spikes, platforms, holes and monsters.

As said before you have to get the gems, use a portal to go to the next level, the game seems so long even though it only has 5 levels and one boss.

You should finish it in 2-3 hours for 100% and 1h30-2h to finish it as quickly as possible, you are almost forced to do everything the game offers.

You need to get at least 2335 gems to finish it and 3195 gems for 100% (even more, because there are bonus gems in levels 4 and 5 that are not taken into account, so we end up with 541/500). This makes the experience monotonous; forcing the player to explore the levels is good, but everything looks the same and there are only gems to collect.