🔗 Share this article

Following my time with more than 200 fresh titles this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I am at peace with the concluding selections, despite being aware plenty of stellar titles likely fell under the radar. Currently, my only job is to except relax, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— ah crap, discovered one more great game. There go my peaceful respite!

An Early Contender Emerges

In my more off-hours play, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of high stakes danger and payoff. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you enjoy being aware of a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The setup is that you must venture into a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. Mechanically, this creates some familiar roguelike structure. Pick a hero possessing unique attributes and skills, fight through each level of enemies, collect some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Gameplay Loop

The way you actually clear a chamber, is unique. Every time you begin a fresh level, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile 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 which square you land in is up to chance.

You might see a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of selecting any given square in a row.

Then, you'll chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you click on a different row first and try to make safer moves early? That's the risk-reward dynamic in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by gathering teeth that alter which objects you're drawn toward. As an instance, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of getting a reward too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a better shot at selecting the optimal square.
• In one run, I put all my stat upgrades toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would increase my odds of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I constructed my hero around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I opened a chest.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but it provides ample to experiment with to let you manipulate numbers according to your strategy.

An Ever-Present Risk

Of course, it's still a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have an 80% chance to land on the desired tile but wind up hitting on an enemy that would eliminate your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and choose whether to keep clicking or to proceed to the next floor as opposed to testing fate.

Items like enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, just like some character abilities. One hero's unique ability, powered up by clearing four squares, allows players to click on a vertical column rather than a horizontal row during that action. If you play this move wisely, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in its preview phase, and it has another update scheduled until the final game is launched. Another playable adventurer and a new boss are expected to drop by the end of January. The full launch likely won't be far behind, but the game's developers haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

Whenever its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of small details and banking my earned gold per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, such as additional heroes and items I can buy mid-attempt. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I suspect I'll still be attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the entire experience.