I love a good roguelike. And I mean roguelike roguelikes, the kind without meta-progression and generally carrying stuff over between runs or lives. I just prefer a more arcade-like experience where my run is my single, isolated run. Anyway, sorry, I'm taking away from TEOCALLI, which is a very good, simple little roguelike.
In TEOCALLI, you make your way down 13 floors, fighting spiders, snakes, skeletons, axocotl, and others, while collecting cacao, using potions, finding gear, all that good stuff. The gameplay itself is pretty straightforward and enemies follow predictable patterns. It that sense, it reminded me a lot of Crypt of the NecroDancer, where enemies tend to have "solutions" you can maneuver your way around, but these interactions get more complicated as multiple enemies approach. Things are very simple to understand and TEOCALLI is a very approachable game, with the only serious "trick" is that bumping into a wall effectively skips a turn, letting you wait.
I don't want to say "for 1-bit graphics", since that would imply something I'm probably not actually wanting to say. Still, TEOCALLI impressed me with how much it managed to do with both low-resolution pixel graphics, and 1-bit graphics. The game plays with its "lighting" system hard, and the large variety of tiles will be shaded and brightened with all sorts of dithering effects. Enemies are distinct in looks and animation enough that I was able to recognize them even when they were a half-darkened mass of wiggling pixels - a very strong accomplishment.
TEOCALLI didn't take me too long to complete, and I cleared it on my second try, with the first mainly learning the game's idiosyncrasies with turn order and enemy patterns. I suspect anybody with a decent sense of generic turn-based fundamentals will be able to make easy progress. It makes for an excellent "coffee break" sort of game to chill out to, has a long-term home on my hard drive to pick up and play again later.
I enjoyed it. TEOCALLI is a good game.