🔗 Share this article

Having experienced more than 200 new releases this year, It's time to turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, even knowing plenty of excellent games probably slipped through the cracks. Currently, my only plan is to except relax, take a short break, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— oh no, found another brilliant title. There go my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

With my casual gaming time, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of major consequence danger and payoff. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish discovering a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's unlike anything 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 gone missing from the fantasy world. In practice, this creates some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero who has attributes and skills, fight through each level of foes, collect some stat improvements (which are teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Unique Gameplay Loop

The way you truly navigate a dungeon room, however. Whenever you begin a fresh level, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you just select on one of the four rows, but which square you land in is up to chance.

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

Then, you'll probabilities change. So do you take the risk, or do you choose on a different row first and aim for more cautious selections early? That's the risk-reward dynamic in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire a feel for it.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped during an attempt by collecting teeth that alter which objects you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a improved likelihood at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I put all my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth I could that would increase my odds of landing on monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I built my character around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I opened a chest.

The build options are somewhat constrained, but it provides ample to engage with to allow you to tweak numbers to your preference.

An Ever-Present Risk

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have a likely outcome to select the preferred space but wind up hitting a monster that would deplete your final hit point. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and choose whether to continue selecting or when to move on to the next floor as opposed to testing fate.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some special skills. An adventurer's special power, powered up by clearing four squares, allows players to click on a vertical column rather than a horizontal row during that action. By employing this strategically, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in its preview phase, and it has a final update scheduled until the final game is released. A new character and a additional end-level foe are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The full launch likely won't be long after, but the studio haven't announced a final date yet.

A Parting Endorsement

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, discovering its little secrets and saving my accumulated currency every session to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, such as new characters and items I can buy mid-attempt. To this day, I have not reached the bottom, and I get the feeling I'll still be pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the entire experience.