🔗 Share this article

After playing well over 200 fresh titles this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I feel content with the concluding selections, despite being aware plenty of fantastic releases may have dropped through the cracks. Now, there's nothing for me to do except relax, take a short break, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— ah crap, discovered one more brilliant title. So much for my intentions!

A Surprising Front-Runner Appears

In my more laid-back sessions, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a traditional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of significant risk peril and prize. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you relish discovering a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your gaming budget.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The premise is that you must venture into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has vanished from its world. Mechanically, that makes for some recognizable genre framework. Select a character possessing unique attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, pick up some stat improvements (which are teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Unique Gameplay Loop

The way you truly navigate a chamber, is unique. Each instance you begin a fresh level, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. Every tile holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you end up on is determined by luck.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a one-in-four probability of landing on a particular space in a row.

Then, you'll chances are recalculated. So do you go for it, or do you click on a different row first and aim for safer moves early? This is the push-your-luck gameplay on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated 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 reduce the probability of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about manipulating math to the utmost to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I invested my power boosts toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth I could that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I constructed my hero around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would debuff nearby foes every time I claimed a reward.

The customization choices are limited, but it provides ample to experiment with to allow you to tweak numbers the way you want.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Unsurprisingly, it remains a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have a likely outcome to select the square you want but ultimately choose a foe that would take out your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and determine if to press onward or when to move on to the next floor instead of risking it all.

Items like enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, as do some special skills. One hero's unique ability, activated once selecting four tiles, allows players to choose a column instead of a horizontal line during that action. By employing this strategically, you can save that move for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. You'll find an astonishing degree of depth in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is currently in its preview phase, and it has another update scheduled before the full version is launched. An additional hero and a additional end-level foe are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The official version probably isn't long after, but the studio haven't announced a specific release window yet.

A Final Thought

No matter when it's fully released, you ought to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been completely engrossed with it, uncovering each of small details and banking my earned gold every session to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, including fresh adventurers and items purchasable during a run. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I'll continue pursuing that objective when the official release drops. I'm committed for the complete journey.