🔗 Share this article

Having experienced more than 200 new releases this year, I am officially wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I feel content with the final results, even knowing a host of stellar titles likely fell through the cracks. Now, there's plan is to other than unwind, unplug a little, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— well, shoot, found another great game. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

With my casual gaming time, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered potentially my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a conventional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of significant risk risk and reward. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's popular, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your gaming budget.

A Calculated Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from its world. In practice, this results in some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer with their own parameters and powers, clear floor after floor of foes, pick up some passive buffs (which are teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

How you effectively complete a dungeon room, however. Whenever you begin a fresh level, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. All spaces either contains a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To proceed, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you land in is up to chance.

You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a one-in-four probability of selecting a particular space in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you click on a alternative option first and try to make more cautious selections early? Herein lies the push-your-luck gameplay in action in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing when you acquire an understanding of it.

Shaping the Odds

The procedural hook is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. As an instance, you could acquire a perk that will lower your chances of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I put all my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and picked as many teeth possible that would improve my probability of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
• On a different attempt, I constructed my hero around treasure chests and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are limited, but it provides ample to work with to enable you to influence the odds to your preference.

A Constant Gamble

Of course, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the possibility that you have a high probability to hit the preferred space but ultimately choose a monster that would deplete your final hit point. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and choose whether to press onward or to proceed to the subsequent stage instead of testing fate.

Consumables including explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some hero powers. A particular character's signature move, charged after clearing four squares, lets gamers to choose a column instead of a horizontal line on a turn. By employing this strategically, you can hold that ability for the right moment to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in development, and it has another update to go until the full version is unleashed. A new character and a fresh guardian are expected to drop by the end of January. The full launch probably isn't long after, but the game's developers haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Recommendation

No matter 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 unlock a steady stream of permanent unlocks, including new characters and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I'll still be pursuing that objective when the official release drops. Sign me up for the entire experience.