🔗 Share this article

Following my time with in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I am officially wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I feel content with the concluding selections, despite being aware plenty of stellar titles probably slipped through the cracks. Now, there's nothing for me to do but sit back, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— well, shoot, discovered one more great game. There go my intentions!

A Premature Contender Emerges

During my off-hours play, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've encountered potentially my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a conventional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of significant risk risk and reward. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you relish in knowing about a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Tactical Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The premise is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has disappeared from its world. When you play, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero with their own attributes and skills, clear floor after floor of enemies, pick up some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

The way you actually clear a chamber, though. Whenever you start another stage, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile holds a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To proceed, you choose on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you select is a matter of probability.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a 25% chance of selecting a particular space in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you opt on a safer line first and attempt some more cautious selections early? This is the push-your-luck gameplay on display in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing when you acquire a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by gathering teeth that change what things you're more attracted to. For example, you might get a perk that will reduce the probability of hitting a trap, but will also decrease the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I put all my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth I could that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters aligned with that strength.
• On a different attempt, I developed my adventurer around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I secured loot.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to experiment with to allow you to tweak probabilities to your preference.

An Ever-Present Tension

Of course, it remains a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have a likely outcome to select the desired tile but wind up hitting a foe that would eliminate your final hit point. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you clear a floor out and decide when to continue selecting or when to move on to the following level instead of risking it all.

Items like explosive devices help cut down the chance, similar to some special skills. A particular character's special power, powered up by clearing four squares, enables you to choose a column rather than a horizontal line during that action. If you play this move wisely, you can save that move for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking degree of depth in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in early access, and it has a final update to go before the full version is released. An additional hero and a new boss are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The official version may not be far behind, but the game's developers haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Final Recommendation

No matter when it's fully released, you ought to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been thoroughly captivated with it, finding all of hidden nuances and banking my earned gold in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, featuring new characters and items I can buy while playing. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I have a sense I will remain pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the complete journey.