🔗 Share this article

After playing in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is published, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, even knowing a host of stellar titles probably slipped through the cracks. Now, there's plan is to except relax, take a short break, and perhaps take a refreshing hike in the— oh no, discovered one more brilliant title. So much for my intentions!

A Premature Front-Runner Appears

With my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a conventional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of significant risk risk and reward. Consider this an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's different from everything I've previously experienced. The premise is that you must venture into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from its world. In practice, that makes for some familiar roguelike structure. Pick a hero who has parameters and powers, fight through each level of enemies, collect some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Central System

The way you actually clear a area, is unique. Every time you enter a new floor, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To make a move, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you select is determined by luck.

You may face a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a 25% chance of hitting a specific tile in a row.

Then, you'll chances are recalculated. So do you go for it, or do you click on a safer line first and attempt some less risky choices early? This is the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing when you acquire its rhythm.

Manipulating Probability

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will reduce the probability of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• On a particular session, I invested my power boosts toward brute force and picked as many teeth I could that would improve my probability of landing on monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around treasure chests and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I claimed a reward.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to work with to allow you to tweak probabilities according to your strategy.

A Persistent Gamble

Unsurprisingly, it remains a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have a high probability to select the desired tile but wind up hitting a foe that would deplete your final hit point. Every move is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and determine if to keep clicking or when to move on to the subsequent stage as opposed to pushing your luck.

Items like enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, just like some character abilities. One hero's unique ability, activated once making four moves, lets gamers to choose a vertical column rather than a horizontal line during that action. By employing this strategically, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising degree of depth in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has at least one more update planned before the final game is unleashed. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are planned for release sometime in January. The official version likely won't be much later, but the game's developers haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Thought

Regardless of when its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought 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 access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, such as fresh adventurers and items purchasable during a run. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I get the feeling I'll continue pursuing that objective when the official release drops. Count me in for the long haul.