🔗 Share this article

After playing well over 200 recent games this year, It's time to closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the final results, despite being aware plenty of fantastic releases likely fell through the cracks. At this point, it's plan is to other than unwind, unplug a little, and perhaps take a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, discovered one more amazing experience. There go my plans!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

In my more casual gaming time, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, I've encountered potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of major consequence danger and payoff. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy being aware of a game before it's popular, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your gaming budget.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I'm familiar with. The premise is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, going down level by level in search of the sun, which has disappeared from its world. In practice, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Pick a hero who has stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of monsters, collect some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Gameplay Loop

How you actually clear a dungeon room, however. Each instance you start another stage, the game presents a sixteen-square board of boxes. Every tile holds a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you select is determined by luck.

You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a one-in-four probability of landing on any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you choose on a different row first and attempt some more cautious selections early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get an understanding of it.

Manipulating Probability

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by gathering teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will reduce the probability of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about manipulating math to the utmost to have a higher chance at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I put all my power boosts toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth I could that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• In another run, I built my character around reward boxes and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters each time I claimed a reward.

The build options are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to engage with to enable you to influence numbers the way you want.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the risk that you have a likely outcome to land on the square you want but ultimately choose on an enemy that would take out your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you navigate a level and determine if to keep clicking or to advance to the following level instead of risking it all.

Items like explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, just like some hero powers. An adventurer's unique ability, powered up by selecting four tiles, lets gamers to select a column instead of a row during that action. Should you use this move wisely, you can hold that ability for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is currently in its preview phase, and it has a final update scheduled until the full version is released. Another playable adventurer 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 studio haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

No matter when the complete game arrives, you should consider put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, I've been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its small details and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of permanent unlocks, featuring new characters and items purchasable during a run. To this day, I have not reached the bottom, and I suspect I will remain attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the entire experience.