🔗 Share this article

Having experienced well over 200 new releases this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I am at peace with the final results, accepting that plenty of excellent games may have dropped through the cracks. Currently, my only job is to but sit back, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, discovered one more amazing experience. So much for my plans!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

With my casual gaming time, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across potentially my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of high stakes risk and reward. Consider this an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I've ever played. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor to find the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. In practice, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Select a character who has parameters and powers, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, acquire some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

The way you effectively complete a dungeon room, is unique. Every time you begin a fresh level, you see a four-by-four matrix of boxes. All spaces features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To proceed, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the exact space you select is determined by luck.

You may face a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a 25% chance of selecting any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. So do you take the risk, or do you opt on a different row first and try to make safer moves early? This is the push-your-luck gameplay on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop its rhythm.

Manipulating Probability

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by picking up teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will lower your chances of hitting 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 improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• In one run, I put all my power boosts toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters aligned with that strength.
• On a different attempt, I built my character around treasure chests and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes every time I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are limited, but they are sufficient to work with to allow you to tweak numbers according to your strategy.

A Constant Gamble

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There's always the chance that you have an 80% chance to select the preferred space but wind up hitting a monster that would deplete your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you clear a floor out and determine if to press onward or to advance to the subsequent stage rather than testing fate.

Items like enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some special skills. One hero's signature move, powered up by making four moves, allows players to choose a column instead of a horizontal row on a turn. By employing this move wisely, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is currently in early access, and it has at least one more update to go before the final game is launched. An additional hero and a new boss are planned for release sometime in January. The 1.0 release may not be much later, but the creators haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Concluding Thought

No matter when the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, I've been thoroughly captivated with it, uncovering each of little secrets and saving my accumulated currency every session to reveal a continuous trickle of permanent unlocks, such as new characters and items purchasable while playing. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I suspect I will remain attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the entire experience.