🔗 Share this article

After playing in excess of 200 recent games this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, despite being aware a host of excellent games probably slipped by the wayside. At this point, it's job is to except relax, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, discovered one more amazing experience. So much for my peaceful respite!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

During my laid-back sessions, typically earmarked for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what might become my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of high stakes risk and reward. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you enjoy discovering a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try 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 ever played. The premise is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. When you play, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer possessing unique stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, collect some stat improvements (which are teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Central System

How you effectively complete a dungeon room, though. Each instance you enter a new floor, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you choose on one of the four rows, but which square you land in is up to chance.

You may face a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a quarter likelihood of hitting a specific tile in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. So do you take the risk, or do you opt on a different row first and aim for safer moves early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay in action in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating after you develop a feel for it.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're more likely to land on. For example, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• In one run, I focused my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and picked as many teeth possible that would improve my probability of being drawn to monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, I constructed my hero around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I secured loot.

The customization choices are not endless, but they are sufficient to experiment with to let you manipulate probabilities according to your strategy.

A Constant Gamble

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have a high probability to select the desired tile but wind up hitting a monster that would deplete your remaining life. Every move is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and determine if to keep clicking or to proceed to the next floor as opposed to pushing your luck.

Consumables including explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some hero powers. An adventurer's unique ability, powered up by selecting four tiles, enables you to select a column instead of a row for that move. Should you use your cards right, you can save that move for an optimal time to circumvent a perilous selection. You'll find an astonishing amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has another update to go until the full version is released. A new character and a new boss are planned for release sometime in January. The official version probably isn't far behind, but the creators haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Final Recommendation

No matter when it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been thoroughly captivated with it, finding all of little secrets and storing my run rewards per attempt to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, including fresh adventurers and items purchasable while playing. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I'll continue pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Count me in for the complete journey.