🔗 Share this article

Following my time with in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My year-end list is published, and I'm satisfied with the final results, even knowing a host of stellar titles may have dropped by the wayside. At this point, it's job is to but sit back, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— well, shoot, stumbled upon a brilliant title. There go my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Front-Runner Appears

With my laid-back sessions, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered what could be my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a classic labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of major consequence peril and prize. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride discovering a game before it's popular, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Calculated 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, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from this mythical realm. In practice, this results in some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer who has parameters and powers, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, collect some passive buffs (which are teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Central System

How you actually clear a area, is unique. Every time you start another stage, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you select is up to chance.

You may face a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a one-in-four probability of selecting any given square in a row.

After that, the odds shift. So do you press your luck, or do you click on a alternative option first and try to make less risky choices early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get an understanding of it.

Manipulating Probability

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by picking up teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of hitting a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about manipulating math to the utmost to have a better shot at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I invested my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters aligned with that strength.
• On a different attempt, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I secured loot.

The build options are not endless, but there's enough to experiment with to let you manipulate the odds to your preference.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have a high probability to select the square you want but wind up hitting a foe that would deplete your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and determine if to keep clicking or to proceed to the next floor as opposed to risking it all.

Items like enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, as do some character abilities. A particular character's unique ability, charged after selecting four tiles, enables you to click on a vertical column instead of a row on a turn. By employing this strategically, you can save that move for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has at least one more update to go before the complete edition is launched. A new character and a new boss are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be long after, but the creators haven't set a final date yet.

A Parting Endorsement

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of hidden nuances and banking my earned gold in each run to access a constant flow of permanent unlocks, such as additional heroes and items purchasable mid-attempt. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I have a sense I'll continue attempting that goal when the official release drops. Sign me up for the complete journey.