🔗 Share this article

Having experienced more than 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the ultimate rankings, even knowing a host of stellar titles may have dropped through the cracks. Currently, my only nothing for me to do except relax, disconnect briefly, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a amazing experience. So much for my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

In my more off-hours play, typically earmarked for a handful of quirky titles, I've discovered what might become my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a classic labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of major consequence risk and reward. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you relish in knowing about a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I'm familiar with. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has disappeared from this mythical realm. When you play, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Choose an adventurer possessing unique stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of foes, acquire some passive buffs (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Novel Central System

The method by which you truly navigate a area, however. Whenever you begin a fresh level, the game presents a sixteen-square board of boxes. Every tile holds a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the four rows, but which square you land in is determined by luck.

You may face a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a one-in-four probability of selecting a specific tile in a row.

Then, you'll chances are recalculated. So do you press your luck, or do you choose on a different row first and try to make more cautious selections early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire an understanding of it.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by picking up teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. For example, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a improved likelihood at landing where you want.
• During one attempt, I put all my stat upgrades toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
• On a different attempt, I developed my adventurer around reward boxes and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I opened a chest.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to work with to allow you to tweak numbers the way you want.

A Persistent 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 monster that would take out your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and decide when to keep clicking or to proceed to the following level as opposed to risking it all.

Items like enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, as do some hero powers. A particular character's unique ability, charged after making four moves, 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 an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. You'll find an astonishing level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has at least one more update scheduled until the complete edition is released. A new character and a new boss are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The full launch likely won't be much later, but the game's developers haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Thought

Regardless of when its 1.0 launch occurs, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of little secrets and saving my accumulated currency in each run to unlock a steady stream of permanent unlocks, such as new characters and items purchasable while playing. I still haven't reached the bottom, and I get the feeling I will remain pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the complete journey.