🔗 Share this article

After playing in excess of 200 new releases this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I am at peace with the concluding selections, despite being aware numerous fantastic releases probably slipped under the radar. Now, there's nothing for me to do but sit back, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— ah crap, discovered one more brilliant title. So much for my plans!

A Premature Contender Emerges

In my more casual gaming time, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've encountered what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a classic dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of high stakes danger and payoff. Consider this an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride discovering a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your gaming budget.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The premise is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. Mechanically, this creates some familiar roguelike structure. Choose an adventurer possessing unique stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, acquire some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Unique Core Mechanic

The method by which you actually clear a area, though. Every time you enter a new floor, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To proceed, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you end up on is determined by luck.

You could encounter a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a one-in-four probability of landing on a particular space 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 less risky choices early? This is the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating once you get an understanding of it.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by gathering teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. As an instance, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• During one attempt, I put all my stat upgrades toward brute force and selected all the 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 coupled it with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I claimed a reward.

The strategic possibilities are limited, but there's enough to experiment with to enable you to influence numbers the way you want.

A Constant Risk

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the risk that you have a likely outcome to select the square you want but end up landing a foe that would eliminate your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and choose whether to continue selecting or to advance to the next floor instead of risking it all.

Tools such as explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some special skills. One hero's unique ability, powered up by making four moves, allows players to select a vertical line in place of a row on a turn. Should you use this strategically, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising degree of depth in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has at least one more update to go before the full version is released. Another playable adventurer and a additional end-level foe are scheduled to arrive before the conclusion of January. The official version probably isn't long after, but the studio haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

No matter when it's fully released, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your radar. I have been positively obsessed with it, finding all of hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, such as fresh adventurers and items purchasable while playing. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I have a sense I will remain pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Count me in for the complete journey.