🔗 Share this article

After playing more than 200 recent games this year, I am officially wrapping things up on 2025. My year-end list is live, and I am at peace with the final results, even knowing numerous stellar titles likely fell through the cracks. Now, there's plan is to except relax, unplug a little, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a brilliant title. And just like that, goodbye to my plans!

A Premature Front-Runner Appears

In my more casual gaming time, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a traditional labyrinth explorer into a probability-fueled game of high stakes danger and payoff. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's different from everything I've previously experienced. The setup is that you must venture into a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. In practice, that makes for some familiar roguelike structure. Select a character with their own attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, acquire some permanent upgrades (represented as teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Unique Gameplay Loop

How you effectively complete a dungeon room, is unique. Every time you begin a fresh level, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you end up on is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a one-in-four probability of hitting a particular space in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you click on a different row first and attempt some less risky choices early? Herein lies the push-your-luck gameplay in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire an understanding of it.

Influencing Chance

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by collecting teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I invested my power boosts toward physical attack/defense and picked as many teeth possible that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• In another run, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I secured loot.

The build options are not endless, but there's enough to engage with to enable you to influence probabilities according to your strategy.

A Constant Tension

Of course, it remains a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have an 80% chance to hit the preferred space but ultimately choose a monster that would take out your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and decide when to keep clicking or to advance to the next floor rather than risking it all.

Consumables including enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, similar to some character abilities. An adventurer's signature move, powered up by making four moves, allows players to choose a vertical column rather than a horizontal row for that move. By employing your cards right, you can hold that ability for the right moment to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is currently in its preview phase, and it has a final update scheduled before the full version is unleashed. An additional hero and a additional end-level foe are planned for release by the end of January. The official version may not be far behind, but the game's developers haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Final Thought

Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I have been thoroughly captivated with it, finding all of hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, such as fresh adventurers and items purchasable mid-attempt. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll continue working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the entire experience.