🔗 Share this article

Having experienced well over 200 recent games this year, It's time to turning the page on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, even knowing numerous stellar titles may have dropped by the wayside. At this point, it's plan is to except relax, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a refreshing hike in the— oh no, stumbled upon a brilliant title. And just like that, goodbye to my intentions!

An Early Front-Runner Appears

With my off-hours play, typically earmarked for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a classic dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of significant risk peril and prize. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: 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 Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's unlike anything I'm familiar with. The premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has disappeared from this mythical realm. When you play, this results in some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer who has parameters and powers, clear floor after floor of enemies, collect some passive buffs (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Straightforward, right!

The Unique Gameplay Loop

The method by which you truly navigate a chamber, though. Every time you enter a new floor, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile holds a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the four rows, but which square you land in is up to chance.

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

After that, the probabilities change. So do you press your luck, or do you opt on a different row first and try to make more cautious selections early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic on display in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating after you develop its rhythm.

Manipulating Probability

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated during an attempt by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. For example, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about manipulating math as best you can to have a better shot at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I invested my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and picked as many teeth I could that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I built my character around loot caches and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I claimed a reward.

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

A Constant Gamble

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have an 80% chance to select the desired tile but end up landing on an enemy that would eliminate your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and decide when to continue selecting or when to move on to the next floor rather than risking it all.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, as do some character abilities. An adventurer's special power, activated once making four moves, allows players to choose a column rather than a horizontal line on a turn. If you play this move wisely, you can hold that ability for the right moment to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has at least one more update planned until the final game is launched. An additional hero and a additional end-level foe are planned for release sometime in January. The 1.0 release may not be long after, but the creators haven't announced a concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

Regardless of when its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I have been completely engrossed with it, uncovering each of hidden nuances and banking my earned gold in each run to unlock a steady stream of permanent unlocks, including fresh adventurers and items purchasable mid-attempt. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I suspect I will remain pursuing that objective when the official release drops. I'm committed for the entire experience.