🔗 Share this article

Following my time with more than 200 new releases this year, It's time to turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, despite being aware a host of stellar titles probably slipped through the cracks. Currently, my only nothing for me to do but sit back, disconnect briefly, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— ah crap, found another brilliant title. There go my plans!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

During my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a handful of quirky titles, I've discovered what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of significant risk danger and payoff. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try 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 a departure from all I'm familiar with. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has gone missing from its world. In practice, this creates some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero who has stats and abilities, fight through each level of monsters, collect some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Easy to grasp!

The Novel Core Mechanic

The way you actually clear a dungeon room, though. Each instance you start another stage, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. Each square features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you end up on is a matter of probability.

You could encounter a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of hitting a specific tile in a row.

After that, the odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you opt on a alternative option first and attempt some safer moves early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire an understanding of it.

Shaping the Odds

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped during an attempt by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're more attracted to. As an instance, you could acquire a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about manipulating math to the utmost to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I focused my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth possible that would boost my chances of landing on monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I constructed my hero around treasure chests and coupled it with a perk that would debuff nearby foes every time I opened a chest.

The build options are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to work with to allow you to tweak the odds the way you want.

A Persistent Tension

Of course, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the possibility that you have a likely outcome to hit the square you want but wind up hitting a foe that would take out your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and determine if to press onward or when to move on to the following level as opposed to testing fate.

Consumables including explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, as do some character abilities. An adventurer's signature move, activated once making four moves, enables you to choose a vertical line instead of a horizontal line for that move. Should you use this strategically, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising degree of depth in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has a final update scheduled before the complete edition is released. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The official version likely won't be long after, but the studio haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Thought

Whenever its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of little secrets and storing my run rewards per attempt to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, including additional heroes and items available for acquisition during a run. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I have a sense I'll still be pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the complete journey.