Title: Sol Cesto
Developer: Tambouille, Géraud Zucchini, Chariospirale
Publisher: Goblinz Studio
Release Date: April 10, 2026
Platform: PC
Reviewed on: PC
Price: $13.99 USD

Sol Cesto is a stylish and breezy take on the age-old formula of the roguelike dungeon crawler. Rather than ask you to navigate your way through maze-like dungeons, fend off monsters, and search every corner for treasure and secrets, Sol Cesto streamlines this experience through dice rolls, giving you maximum dungeon with minimum crawling.

Synopsis

The plot of the game is summed up in its subtitle: the sun has disappeared. You play as an adventurer traveling deep underground to find the sun and restore it to the sky. Along the way, you’ll fight strange monsters, meet a few helpful NPCs, and collect treasure to send back to the surface. Oh, and you’ll die. A lot. It is a roguelike, after all,

Thankfully, the treasure that you collect can be spent on permanent upgrades that improve your chances of success in future runs. Player characters get unique passive traits or improved starting items, and the pool of available upgrades and items slowly grows. It’s standard roguelike fare, but it strengthens that “just one more run” feeling that makes games like this so addictive.

Presentation

One of the game’s greatest strengths is its unique visual style. It’s like a medieval enlightened manuscript redrawn by a ‘90s Nickelodeon animator. The player characters and NPCs all have colorful, storybook-like portraits and the in-game sprites have a bouncy, scribbly energy that reminds me of Pizza Tower. Meanwhile, the bosses all look like they were ripped out of eastern European storybooks and Terry Gilliam animations. The bold clashes in art styles make for a really compelling visual experience – you want to keep progressing through the game just to see what the next monster will look like.

The music is also perfectly on point – dungeon synth that rides the line between menacing and mesmerizing. The standout track for me was the first stage’s theme, which strongly evokes the King’s Field soundtrack with its synth vocals over a dark, foreboding bass line. All the non-dungeon floors like upgrade statues and shops also have their own, jauntier themes that serve both to give the soundscape some variety and to contrast these safe spaces with the dangers of the dungeon.

Beyond the general audio and visuals, the game is full of easter eggs and clever little touches. If your strength or magic stat is higher than a monster’s, their idle animation changes to show that they are no longer a threat. NPCs will sometimes peek out from behind the game’s UI to lend a hand. You can use certain items while visiting the shopkeeper to change her inventory or even rob her blind. You can tell that the developers put a lot of care and attention into every little detail, and it makes the game feel more alive.

Gameplay

The core gameplay loop of Sol Cesto is built around calculated risks. Each dungeon floor is composed of a simple 4×4 grid of rooms, all of which are (usually) visible to you. But here’s the twist: you can’t directly control which room you enter. Instead, you select a row on the grid, and your character will move to a random room in that row. You can’t progress to the next floor until you make a certain number of moves, so the challenge is to hit each floor’s move quota while minimizing damage from deadly traps and monsters.

To aid you in your dungeon dives, you’ll find upgrades that affect your probability of landing in certain rooms, and others that grant certain boons based on the types of rooms you land in. Combine these with character-specific “sun abilities” and you start getting some interesting moment-to-moment choices to make. Should you risk trying to get that health pickup, even though it’s right next to a trapped room? Should you burn a charge of your sun ability to guarantee a safe move?

The upgrades and abilities add some depth to the basic gameplay loop, but there isn’t a lot of synergy between them. The only viable build that I could find was one that just applied as many enemy debuffs as possible. I would have liked to see a wider variety of upgrades – maybe some that affect your character’s strength and magic stats, or apply a bonus on only a specific row or column of the grid.

Furthermore, what few useful upgrades there are only come along fairly late into the game. Your first ten or so runs are all going to be nearly identical, with few meaningful choices available to the player. This is a result of the game’s progress being based almost entirely on coins that you send back to the surface. You have to pay large sums of coins to unlock any of the useful upgrades and shop items, so your first several runs are little more than money-grinding runs.

One more complaint – why, in the year of our lord twenty twenty-six, does this game not have an option to save and quit? That’s inexcusable to me. This is a really great pick-up-and-play game, but sometimes I only have time to get through a handful of floors, and a good run can take over an hour. I don’t think it should be necessary for me to leave the game running in the background when I step away.

Final Score (3.5 Out of 5 Stars)

Sol Cesto is a really great second screen game. As fantastic as the visuals are, you’re going to be seeing a lot of them over and over. Once the presentation loses its sheen, you’re left with a serviceable little roguelike, something to fiddle with while listening to a podcast or watching TV.

I don’t regret my time with Sol Cesto – in fact, I plan to continue plucking away at it until I get the true ending. If you’re looking for something in the vein of Balatro or Slay the Spire but want something a little more streamlined, this is the perfect game for you.

Have you tried Sol Cesto? Do you have other stylish roguelikes you want to tell us about? Let us know in the comments below, or head on over to our Discord and join the conversation!

Featured Image: Goblinz Studio

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