🔗 Share this article

Following my time with more than 200 recent games this year, It's time to closing the book on 2025. My year-end list is out in the world, and I feel content with the concluding selections, accepting that a host of stellar titles may have dropped through the cracks. Now, there's job is to except relax, unplug a little, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— ah crap, found another great game. And just like that, goodbye to my intentions!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

During my off-hours play, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, I've discovered potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of major consequence peril and prize. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's popular, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's unlike anything I've previously experienced. The premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from its world. Mechanically, that makes for some familiar roguelike structure. Select a character who has stats and abilities, fight through each level of foes, acquire some stat improvements (which are teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Unique Central System

The method by which you effectively complete a dungeon room, though. Every time you start another stage, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. All spaces holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To make a move, you choose on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you land in is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of hitting a particular space in a row.

After that, the odds shift. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you choose on a different row first and attempt some safer moves early? That's the risk-reward dynamic on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get its rhythm.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of getting a reward too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math as best you can to have a improved likelihood at landing where you want.
• In one run, I focused my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth possible that would increase my odds of landing on monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I constructed my hero around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I claimed a reward.

The build options are limited, but they are sufficient to work with to enable you to influence the odds to your preference.

An Ever-Present Tension

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have an 80% chance to land on the square you want but end up landing a foe that would eliminate your remaining life. Every move is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you navigate a level and determine if to continue selecting or to advance to the following level as opposed to pushing your luck.

Tools such as destructive ordnance aid in reducing the chance, as do some character abilities. A particular character's signature move, charged after clearing four squares, allows players to choose a vertical column in place of a row during that action. If you play this move wisely, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising degree of depth in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is remaining in early access, and it has a final update planned before the full version is unleashed. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are expected to drop sometime in January. The 1.0 release probably isn't long after, but the studio haven't announced a final date yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, discovering its hidden nuances and banking my earned gold in each run to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, such as fresh adventurers and items I can buy during a run. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I have a sense I'll still be attempting that goal when the official release drops. Count me in for the long haul.