The Sun has disappeared, and bad news for you—it’s down in a dark, expansive dungeon. Sol Cesto’s opening cinematic shows that things used to be nice, and now everything sucks, so you’re tasked with heading down to take it back. Chance will be on your side as often as it’s not, but there are ways to thumb the scales in your favor.
Sol Cesto is a roguelite dungeon crawler where you take your chosen character through over 100 floors in pursuit of the lost Sun. Each floor presents you with a 4×4 grid of rooms, populated by monsters (all contenders for 2026’s best Weird Little Guys awards), treasure, traps, and more, and you must clear a certain number of rooms before the door to the next floor will unlock. Monsters are all defeated in one hit, but you may take damage yourself if your strength or magic stat is not at least equal to theirs.
The catch is that you don’t select the specific room that you enter—you pick a row, and your room is chosen randomly. The percent chance that you will land in a specific room is always visible, so Sol Cesto starts as a game of understanding probabilities and making informed choices. For example, three enemies in one row will hurt me, but only two in the row below can hurt me, so I know which row to take my chances on. Make enough smart choices and you will be able to advance deeper and deeper into the dungeon.
As a run-based game, you’ll make run-specific build choices as you play. Pick one of three upgrades in one room and buy something from the merchant in another room; genre-savvy players will be well-accustomed to this type of decision-making. Sol Cesto’s unique spin is that since this is a game based on random chance, its upgrades all serve to add predictability to your decision-making. For example, the arrow item you can grab from the shop will kill one enemy of your choice, so you don’t need to rely on favorable RNG as much in that particular row, and the tooth upgrades (yes, you read that correctly) will skew the percentages to land in certain types of rooms in both favorable and unfavorable ways.
While many roguelites introduce upgrades to your character, here it adjusts the magnets pulling your character to specific places. These choices feel compelling at first and usually have tangible impacts, but toward the end of the game, I found one build that was so clearly superior (and easy enough to get going) that I was mostly incentivized to take the same upgrades on each run. One of the appeals of roguelikes and roguelites is run-to-run variety, and while there are lots of characters with unique skills and stats, the winning build for everyone felt pretty similar, and I ended up clearing the game with three different characters in very similar ways.
This chance-based gameplay produced some very frustrating runs where I had four unlucky results in a row and lost at a terrible moment, as well as some fist-pumping triumphs, including one where a literal 50/50 chance determined whether I’d be winning the run or dying on the final floor. These chance-based wins and losses made Sol Cesto feel less like a dungeon crawler—notably, the genre of the original Rogue and the many imitators that birthed the genre, a genre often paired with RPG elements—and more like many of the more modern gambling-adjacent roguelikes of recent years.
After all, what is a parlor game if not a game of chance? If you think of a row of Sol Cesto rooms as a roulette wheel, your interactions work the same way. Sure, you find ways to resize the pockets, but your interactions will mostly be some form of “spin it again!” You can build toward black, you can build toward red, but you’ll rarely do more than give it another spin. Failures will feel like bad RNG more than a failure of skill or strategy, which is sometimes frustrating but just as often got me in the mindset of “No no no, one more run, this time will be the lucky one!”
That made this a very compelling game, but in a way that I enjoy less than in a game where I lost because of my own skill or strategy. Clicking the row with the best percentages never stops being the play, and metaprogression unlocks made each run easier until I suddenly beat the game three times in a row. I’m not positive that I’m better at Sol Cesto at hour 13 than I was at hour 4; I’m simply taking advantage of a few extremely powerful upgrades that very reliably spawned in my later hours.
That steady power growth will appeal to some, and you do always need to make sure that you’re making good choices, but those choices never changed in meaningful ways for me, and it always felt like a game that I would complete as long as I played enough and unlocked enough things. The experience is a fairly chill one, but not one that tickled my strategic brain very often beyond the basic idea that 33% is better than 25%, and so on.
Sol Cesto ameliorates some of those feelings of mine by hiding a lot of secrets throughout the game, not unlike recent knowledge-based games like Blue Prince or Animal Well. It does not approach the depth of those titles, but it does have plenty to discover, especially if you get in the mindset of “What happens if I use this item here?” The hints can be extremely opaque, and as with Blue Prince, the procedural nature of the dungeon means sometimes you won’t find the item you’re hoping to test. With a comparatively smaller to-experiment list, runs can feel like dead ends from that perspective, but there was enough to keep me interested on that level, and the eventual discoveries felt meaningful enough to make it worthwhile.
It’s also a game of playing the odds. Sometimes you get an arrangement of enemies that will wreck you. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and hit all the treasure while avoiding all the traps. Sometimes you’ll have a 48% chance to land on that healing strawberry but miss three times in a row and die. Sometimes you’ll find the item that will help you test that theory about the blacksmith, and sometimes you won’t. The only consistent thing is the fantastic visual design and music, which I’ve not spent much time on in this review, so I hope you’ve enjoyed the screenshots.
