🔗 Share this article

After playing more than 200 recent games this year, I'm formally closing the book on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I am at peace with the final results, accepting that numerous stellar titles probably slipped under the radar. Now, there's nothing for me to do except relax, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, discovered one more great game. And just like that, goodbye to my plans!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

With my laid-back sessions, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, I've discovered what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a classic dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of significant risk risk and reward. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I've ever played. The premise is that you must venture into a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. When you play, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer possessing unique stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of monsters, acquire some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Easy to grasp!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

How you actually clear a chamber, though. Each instance you begin a fresh level, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. All spaces holds a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To proceed, you just select on one of the four rows, but which square you land in is up to chance.

You might see a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of hitting any given square in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. So do you go for it, or do you opt on a alternative option first and aim for more cautious selections early? Herein lies the push-your-luck gameplay in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get an understanding of it.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers to the utmost to have a higher chance 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 boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I constructed my hero around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I claimed a reward.

The customization choices are not endless, but there's enough to engage with to enable you to influence numbers to your preference.

A Constant Risk

Naturally, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the risk that you have a likely outcome to hit the square you want but end up landing a monster that would deplete your final hit point. Every move is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and decide when to continue selecting or to proceed to the subsequent stage rather than risking it all.

Items like explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, as do some character abilities. A particular character's special power, activated once clearing four squares, allows players to click on a column rather than a horizontal line for that move. Should you use 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 basic action of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has at least one more update to go until the full version is released. An additional hero and a additional end-level foe are planned for release by the end of January. The full launch likely won't be long after, but the creators haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Final Recommendation

Regardless of when its 1.0 launch occurs, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, uncovering each of hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, including additional heroes and items purchasable during a run. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I'll continue working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the entire experience.