🔗 Share this article

Having experienced more than 200 recent games this year, I'm formally closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I'm satisfied with the final results, despite being aware numerous stellar titles likely fell under the radar. Now, there's job is to other than unwind, take a short break, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, found another great game. So much for my peaceful respite!

An Early Contender Emerges

In my more off-hours play, typically earmarked for a few oddball curiosities, I've discovered potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of high stakes danger and payoff. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you relish being aware of a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your gaming budget.

A Tactical Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's unlike anything I'm familiar with. The concept is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. In practice, this creates some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero possessing unique attributes and skills, clear floor after floor of monsters, pick up some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

The method by which 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 treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you end up on is a matter of probability.

You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a 25% chance of selecting any given square in a row.

Then, you'll odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you choose on a alternative option first and attempt some more cautious selections early? This is the risk-reward dynamic on display in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. For example, you could acquire a perk that will lower your chances of hitting a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• During one attempt, I focused my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth I could that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I secured loot.

The build options are not endless, but it provides ample to work with to let you manipulate numbers to your preference.

A Persistent Gamble

Of course, it remains a game of chance. You constantly face the possibility that you have an 80% chance to hit the preferred space but wind up hitting on an enemy that would eliminate your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and decide when to continue selecting or when to move on to the subsequent stage as opposed to risking it all.

Tools such as explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, as do some special skills. One hero's unique ability, activated once making four moves, allows players to click on a column rather than a horizontal row during that action. If you play this strategically, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in its preview phase, and it has at least one more update to go until the full version is released. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are expected to drop before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release may not be far behind, but the game's developers haven't announced a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Recommendation

No matter when it's fully released, you ought to 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 unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, such as additional heroes and items I can buy while playing. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I have a sense I'll still be attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the entire experience.