🔗 Share this article

Following my time with in excess of 200 recent games this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, accepting that numerous excellent games may have dropped by the wayside. At this point, it's plan is to except relax, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a amazing experience. So much for my intentions!

A Premature Front-Runner Appears

With my casual gaming time, typically earmarked for a few oddball curiosities, I've discovered potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a conventional labyrinth explorer into a probability-fueled game of major consequence peril and prize. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish being aware of a game before it hits the mainstream, sample Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your wallet for unique titles.

A Calculated Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's a departure from all 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 vanished from its world. In practice, this creates some recognizable genre framework. Select a character with their own stats and abilities, fight through each level of enemies, collect some passive buffs (in the form of teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Novel Core Mechanic

How you effectively complete a area, is unique. Each instance you start another stage, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the exact space you land in is up to chance.

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

Subsequently, your chances are recalculated. So do you take the risk, or do you choose on a different row first and aim for less risky choices early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating after you develop an understanding of it.

Shaping the Odds

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will also decrease the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers to the utmost to have a better shot at landing where you want.
• During one attempt, I focused my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and picked as many teeth possible that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I built my character around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I secured loot.

The build options are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to work with to let you manipulate numbers to your preference.

An Ever-Present Tension

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. You constantly face the risk that you have a high probability to hit the square you want but wind up hitting a monster that would take out your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and determine if to press onward or when to move on to the subsequent stage instead of testing fate.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, as do some hero powers. A particular character's signature move, charged after making four moves, allows players to choose a vertical line rather than a horizontal line during that action. Should you use this move wisely, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has at least one more update to go before the complete edition is unleashed. A new character and a new boss are planned for release before the conclusion of January. The official version may not be far behind, but the studio haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Final Endorsement

No matter when the complete game arrives, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of small details and saving my accumulated currency every session to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, featuring new characters and items I can buy while playing. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll still be pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Sign me up for the complete journey.