After playing well over 200 new releases this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My year-end list is published, as is gamexplore’s, and I am at peace with the final results, even knowing plenty of excellent games likely fell through the cracks. Now, there’s nothing for me to do but sit back, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— ah crap, found another great game. There go my plans!
In my more casual gaming time, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I’ve come across what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of high stakes risk and reward. It launched into early access back in May, and it sure sounds like a 1.0 release is imminent sometime in 2026, judging by a recent message to players from the developers. Consider this a hipster’s insider tip: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it’s cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.
Created by a small team of French developers, Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that’s unlike anything I’ve ever played before. The premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. In practice, that makes for some familiar roguelike structure. Pick a hero who has their own stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of enemies, pick up some passive buffs (in the form of teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Simple enough!
The way you actually clear a dungeon room, though, is unique. Every time you enter a new floor, you’re shown a 4×4 grid of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a treasure chest, 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 up to chance. You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of landing on any given square in a row, so you would have a 50% chance of landing on a monster in that scenario and taking one point of damage while killing it. Then, you’ll only have a 33% chance of hitting the remaining monster on your next click, so the odds of getting the chest or strawberry are now higher. So do you go for it, or do you click on a different row first and try to make some safer moves early? That’s the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it’s absorbing once you get a feel for it.
The roguelike twist of it is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by picking up teeth that change what things you’re more attracted to. For example, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of landing on a treasure chest too. Creating a build is about manipulating math as best you can to have a better shot at landing where you want when you click. In one run, I put all my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and picked as many teeth as I could that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type, and away from ones that use magic. In another run, I built my character around treasure chests and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I opened a chest. The build options are limited, but there’s enough to work with to let you manipulate numbers the way you want them.
Of course, it’s still a game of chance. There’s always the possibility that you have an 80% chance to land on the square you want but end up landing on an enemy that would take out your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so there’s a constant tension as you clear a floor out and decide when to keep clicking or when to move on to the next floor instead of pushing your luck. Items like enemy-killing bombs help cut down the chance, as do some character abilities. One hero’s special power, charged after clearing four squares, allows players to click on a vertical column instead of a horizontal row on a turn. If you play your cards right, you can save that move for the right moment to avoid a risky decision. There’s a shocking amount of nuance in the simple act of clicking.
Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has at least one more update to go until the final game is released. A new character and a new boss are expected to drop by the end of January. The 1.0 release likely won’t be far behind, but the game’s developers haven’t committed to a final date yet.
No matter when it’s fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I’ve been positively obsessed with it for the past week, finding all of its little secrets and banking my earned gold in each run to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, including new characters and items I can buy during a run. I still haven’t reached the bottom of the dungeon yet, and I get the feeling I’ll still be working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the long haul.
