🔗 Share this article

Following my time with well over 200 recent games this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My year-end list is out in the world, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, despite being aware a host of stellar titles may have dropped through the cracks. Now, there's plan is to other than unwind, take a short break, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— oh no, found another amazing experience. So much for my intentions!

An Early Front-Runner Appears

With my casual gaming time, typically earmarked for a handful of quirky titles, I've encountered what might become my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of high stakes danger and payoff. Consider this a preview for the in-the-know: If you relish discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try so you can make a dent in your wallet for unique titles.

A Tactical Roguelike Twist

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 in search of the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. In practice, that makes for some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer with their own stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, pick up some permanent upgrades (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Central System

How you truly navigate a chamber, however. Each instance you start another stage, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you select is determined by luck.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a one-in-four probability of landing on a particular space in a row.

After that, the chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you opt on a different row first and attempt some more cautious selections early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get an understanding of it.

Shaping the Odds

The meta-layer is that your odds can be manipulated through a run 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 landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I put all my attribute improvements toward brute force and chose every teeth I could that would increase my odds of landing on monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, I built my character around loot caches and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I secured loot.

The customization choices are limited, but there's enough to work with to enable you to influence the odds according to your strategy.

A Persistent Gamble

Naturally, it's still a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have a likely outcome to select the desired tile but wind up hitting on an enemy that would take out your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you work through a stage and choose whether to press onward or when to move on to the following level instead of testing fate.

Consumables including explosive devices help cut down the chance, as do some special skills. One hero's unique ability, powered up by making four moves, enables you to choose a vertical line instead of a horizontal line during that action. Should you use this move wisely, you can hold that ability for the right moment to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has at least one more update to go until the complete edition is launched. Another playable adventurer and a new boss are expected to drop sometime in January. The 1.0 release likely won't be far behind, but the game's developers haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Thought

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you should consider put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, 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 meta progression rewards, such as new characters and items I can buy while playing. To this day, I have not reached the bottom, and I suspect I'll still be working on that task when the full version launches. Sign me up for the complete journey.