🔗 Share this article

After playing well over 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally closing the book on 2025. My year-end list is live, and I feel content with the final results, even knowing numerous stellar titles probably slipped through the cracks. Now, there's nothing for me to do except relax, unplug a little, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a amazing experience. There go my plans!

An Early Front-Runner Appears

During my casual gaming time, typically earmarked for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a conventional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of significant risk peril and prize. View this a preview for the in-the-know: If you enjoy in knowing about a game before it's popular, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I've previously experienced. The concept is that you need to explore a dungeon, going down level by level on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. In practice, this creates some familiar roguelike structure. Choose an adventurer who has stats and abilities, fight through each level of foes, collect some permanent upgrades (which are teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Easy to grasp!

The Novel Core Mechanic

The way you truly navigate a chamber, is unique. Every time you enter a new floor, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To explore a room, you just select on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you select is a matter of probability.

You could encounter a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a quarter likelihood of selecting a specific tile in a row.

Then, you'll odds shift. So do you press your luck, or do you opt on a safer line first and attempt some more cautious selections early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by gathering teeth that alter which objects you're more likely to land on. As an instance, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a reward too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math as best you can to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I put all my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth possible that would boost my chances of landing on monsters of that variety.
• On a different attempt, I built my character around treasure chests and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I secured loot.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but there's enough to engage with to enable you to influence numbers to your preference.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Naturally, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have an 80% chance to land on the square you want but wind up hitting a foe that would eliminate your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and choose whether to keep clicking or to proceed to the subsequent stage rather than testing fate.

Tools such as explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, similar to some hero powers. A particular character's special power, charged after clearing four squares, lets gamers to click on a vertical line instead of a row on a turn. Should you use this move wisely, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is currently in early access, and it has at least one more update scheduled before the full version is launched. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are planned for release by the end of January. The official version may not be far behind, but the studio haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Endorsement

No matter when it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I have been completely engrossed with it, discovering its hidden nuances and banking my earned gold in each run to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, including new characters and items purchasable during a run. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll continue pursuing that objective when the official release drops. Count me in for the entire experience.