Having experienced well over 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is published, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, accepting that numerous stellar titles likely fell by the wayside. Now, there's job is to other than unwind, unplug a little, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— oh no, discovered one more brilliant title. There go my peaceful respite!
A Surprising Contender Emerges
During my casual gaming time, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've come across what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a traditional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of high stakes risk and reward. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you enjoy in knowing about a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your gaming budget.
A Calculated Dungeon-Crawling Innovation
Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's a departure from all I'm familiar with. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has gone missing from this mythical realm. In practice, that makes for some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero with their own parameters and powers, clear floor after floor of monsters, collect some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!
The Distinctive Core Mechanic
How you actually clear a chamber, though. Each instance you begin a fresh level, the game presents a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To proceed, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you select is determined by luck.
You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a 25% chance of landing on a particular space in a row.
After that, the chances are recalculated. So do you press your luck, or do you opt on a safer line first and aim for safer moves early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get a feel for it.
Influencing Chance
The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by gathering teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. For example, you may obtain a perk that will reduce the probability 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 higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
- During one attempt, I invested my power boosts toward brute force and selected all the teeth possible that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
- During a separate session, I built my character around reward boxes and coupled it with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I opened a chest.
The build options are not endless, but there's enough to engage with to let you manipulate probabilities to your preference.
An Ever-Present Gamble
Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have an 80% chance to land on the preferred space but ultimately choose on an enemy that would eliminate your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and decide when to continue selecting or to advance to the next floor as opposed to risking it all.
Items like enemy-killing bombs help cut down the chance, as do some character abilities. A particular character's unique ability, charged after making four moves, lets gamers to choose a column in place of a horizontal row during that action. By employing this move wisely, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.
Future Development
Sol Cesto is still in development, and it has another update planned before the complete edition is released. A new character and a fresh guardian are expected to drop by the end of January. The full launch may not be long after, but the game's developers haven't set a specific release window yet.
A Concluding Thought
No matter when the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of small details and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, such as new characters and items I can buy while playing. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I'll still be working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the long haul.
