🔗 Share this article

After playing more than 200 new releases this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I feel content with the final results, even knowing plenty of excellent games probably slipped through the cracks. At this point, it's nothing for me to do other than unwind, unplug a little, and perhaps take a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, discovered one more great game. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

A Premature Front-Runner Appears

In my more laid-back sessions, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've discovered what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a classic labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of major consequence peril and prize. View this a preview for the in-the-know: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's popular, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The premise is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. When you play, that makes for some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero with their own parameters and powers, clear floor after floor of foes, pick up some stat improvements (which are teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Central System

The way you truly navigate a dungeon room, however. Every time you begin a fresh level, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To make a move, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you select is determined by luck.

You may face a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a one-in-four probability of selecting any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you click on a safer line first and aim for safer moves early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced during an attempt by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're more attracted to. As an instance, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of getting a reward too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math as best you can to have a better shot at selecting the optimal square.
• In one run, I invested my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and picked as many teeth I could that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, I constructed my hero around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to work with to allow you to tweak the odds according to your strategy.

An Ever-Present Tension

Of course, it remains a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have a likely outcome to hit the desired tile but ultimately choose a monster that would deplete your final hit point. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and determine if to continue selecting or to advance to the next floor rather than testing fate.

Items like explosive devices help cut down the chance, as do some hero powers. One hero's signature move, powered up by selecting four tiles, allows players to click on a vertical line in place of a horizontal row on a turn. By employing your cards right, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is remaining in early access, and it has a final update scheduled until the complete edition is unleashed. An additional hero and a new boss are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The official version likely won't be long after, but the creators haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Thought

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of small details and storing my run rewards per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, featuring fresh adventurers and items available for acquisition while playing. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I will remain pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the complete journey.