🔗 Share this article

Having experienced in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My year-end list is live, and I feel content with the final results, even knowing plenty of excellent games probably slipped by the wayside. At this point, it's job is to except relax, take a short break, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— ah crap, discovered one more great game. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

In my more casual gaming time, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a classic dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of major consequence risk and reward. View this a preview for the in-the-know: If you take pride discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, sample Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The concept is that you must venture into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from its world. Mechanically, this results in some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero possessing unique stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of foes, acquire some stat improvements (which are teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

The method by which you actually clear a dungeon room, though. Every time you start another stage, you see a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you just select on one of the four rows, but which square you select is up to chance.

You may face a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a one-in-four probability of hitting a particular space in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you choose on a alternative option first and try to make safer moves early? This is the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop its rhythm.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by collecting teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. As an instance, you could acquire a perk that will reduce the probability of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• On a particular session, I invested my power boosts toward melee prowess and picked as many teeth I could that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I developed my adventurer around treasure chests and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes every time I opened a chest.

The customization choices are not endless, but it provides ample to engage with to let you manipulate numbers the way you want.

A Persistent Gamble

Of course, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the possibility that you have an 80% chance to select the square you want but ultimately choose on an enemy that would take out your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you work through a stage and choose whether to press onward or to advance to the next floor instead of risking it all.

Consumables including explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, as do some hero powers. One hero's signature move, powered up by selecting four tiles, lets gamers to click on a vertical line instead of a horizontal line during that action. By employing this strategically, you can save that move for an optimal time to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking degree of depth in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has a final update planned before the full version is launched. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The official version probably isn't much later, but the game's developers haven't announced a specific release window yet.

A Parting Endorsement

Whenever its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its hidden nuances and storing my run rewards in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, such as fresh adventurers and items purchasable while playing. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I have a sense I'll continue pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the entire experience.