🔗 Share this article

Having experienced in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is published, and I feel content with the concluding selections, accepting that numerous fantastic releases likely fell under the radar. Currently, my only nothing for me to do except relax, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— oh no, discovered one more amazing experience. There go my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

With my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've encountered what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a conventional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of significant risk risk and reward. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride being aware of a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your wallet for unique titles.

A Tactical Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I've ever played. The concept is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from its world. In practice, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer possessing unique stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of foes, pick up some passive buffs (which are teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

The method by which you effectively complete a dungeon room, however. Each instance you start another stage, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you end up on is determined by luck.

You may face a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of hitting a particular space in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you opt on a different row first and try to make less risky choices early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by picking up teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• In one run, I focused my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth I could that would improve my probability of being drawn to monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would debuff nearby foes whenever I claimed a reward.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to experiment with to allow you to tweak the odds according to your strategy.

A Persistent Tension

Naturally, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the risk that you have a likely outcome to select the square you want but wind up hitting a foe that would eliminate your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and determine if to keep clicking or to proceed to the next floor instead of risking it all.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, similar to some character abilities. An adventurer's unique ability, activated once clearing four squares, allows players to select a vertical column instead of a row for that move. Should you use this move wisely, you can hold that ability for the right moment to circumvent a perilous selection. You'll find an astonishing level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in development, and it has a final update planned until the complete edition is released. A new character and a new boss are planned for release before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release may not be long after, but the studio haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Parting Recommendation

No matter when the complete game arrives, you should consider put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, discovering its small details and storing my run rewards in each run to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, featuring new characters and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I get the feeling I will remain attempting that goal when the official release drops. I'm committed for the entire experience.