🔗 Share this article

Having experienced in excess of 200 recent games this year, It's time to turning the page on 2025. My year-end list is live, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, despite being aware plenty of excellent games probably slipped by the wayside. Now, there's job is to other than unwind, unplug a little, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, found another amazing experience. There go my plans!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

During my laid-back sessions, typically earmarked for a selection of unusual games, I've come across potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of high stakes danger and payoff. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride being aware of a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Calculated Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The premise is that you must venture into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. In practice, this creates some familiar roguelike structure. Pick a hero who has attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, pick up some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Simple enough!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

The way you effectively complete a dungeon room, though. Whenever you enter a new floor, you see a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square features a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you select is a matter of probability.

You might see a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of selecting a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you choose on a different row first and attempt some more cautious selections early? That's the risk-reward dynamic on display 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 through a run by gathering teeth that change what things you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a reward too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math to the utmost to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• In one run, I invested my stat upgrades toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters with that damage type.
• On a different attempt, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes whenever I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but there's enough to experiment with to allow you to tweak the odds according to your strategy.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have a likely outcome to land on the square you want but wind up hitting a monster that would take out your remaining life. Every move is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and choose whether to press onward or to advance to the next floor rather than testing fate.

Items like destructive ordnance help cut down the chance, just like some character abilities. One hero's special power, charged after selecting four tiles, enables you to choose a vertical line instead of a horizontal row for that move. By employing this strategically, you can save that move for an optimal time to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has at least one more update scheduled until the full version is released. An additional hero and a additional end-level foe are scheduled to arrive before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release probably isn't far behind, but the creators haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Thought

Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I have been positively obsessed with it, finding all of hidden nuances and banking my earned gold per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, featuring additional heroes and items I can buy mid-attempt. I still haven't reached the bottom, and I suspect I'll still be pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the entire experience.