Teppo and the Secret Ancient City: A Review

The game “Teppo and the Secret Ancient City” was provided to me by thedailygamepad.net and was given to us for free by the game’s developers/publishers. On behalf of thedailygamepad.net, I’d like to thank the developers/publishers for giving us a free copy of the game to review. This review will contain my thoughts on the game as played on a Nintendo Switch Lite.

Teppo and the Secret Ancient City is a fascinating adventure in which players assume the character of explorer Teppo as he searches for the mythical stone stronghold hidden in the Amazon jungle. Meeting the mysterious Tanaca Wanax, the last chief of the unknown tribe of elected allies, and Ugha Lulala, players will learn about the remarkable and fantastic history of a highly sophisticated ancient civilization that outperformed the Mayas and Incas.

When I first saw Teppo and the Secret Ancient City, I was interested in it. Mainly because it was a platformer and reminded me of the platformers of yesteryear. So when we were offered a key to play the game on the Nintendo Switch, I was thrilled to give it a go. As I own a Nintendo Switch Lite, it does give it a different perspective than playing on a Nintendo Switch, or a Nintendo Switch OLED. Upon starting the game, you are told the story of an ancient civilization and its stronghold. Then it goes into the tutorial for the game. The way the tutorial is set up, you walk past golden tablets, and it explains the game’s controls and the game’s objective. You are informed that there are three weapons that you can obtain in the game, a boomerang, a bomb, and a gun. To advance to the next level, you must collect all of the diamonds on the level to open the portal, which then pushes you to the next world/level. Essentially, the game is pretty straightforward in its objective.

However, there is a drastic jump from the tutorial to the actual game. In the first level alone, you have to collect 550 diamonds to progress to the next level. Now remember that to progress to the next level or world, you have to collect every single diamond. This means that if you get to the portal before you collect them all, you have to do a lot of backtracking and try to figure out where you could have possibly missed diamonds. On top of this, once you kill enemies, they don’t stay dead. They disappear for about 5 seconds before they come back to life. The good thing about this is at least you’re not backtracking through an empty level, but if there were enemies with whom you had issues getting past, you have to face them again.

The game mentions that there are three weapons at the beginning of the game in the tutorial. In my playthrough, it took about 20 minutes before I got to the first weapon, which was the boomerang I had collected about 130 diamonds thus far, but the anxiety of having to possibly go back because I didn’t get all the diamonds kept nagging at me. So I found myself going back to make sure I didn’t miss any of the diamonds, I hadn’t missed anything. The reason I stressed this is because you are granted 5 lives in the game, and once you lose all your lives, the game is over. However, there are save points throughout the level, so you can continue your game at the last save point.

The controls when I first played were a little rough, but after going back to play again recently, the developer seemed to have corrected it, and that was the aiming of the boomerang with the right analog stick and using X to shoot it off, but it appears that they added extra keys to make it easier to shoot off the boomerang.

I also thought that the game did look good on the Nintendo Switch’s Lite Screen, and I did have fun with the game. I would have just liked the levels to have fewer diamonds, to begin with and then get more difficult as the game went on. Starting by collecting 550 diamonds was a bit much, but I still had fun with the game.

If you would like to play Teppo and the Secret Ancient City for yourself you can pick up the game on consoles via Nintendo eShop, PlayStation Store, or Xbox Live Marketplace for the price of $7.99 USD.