Sol Cesto is a super weird tactical roguelite with rad art all about luck and pulling teeth

It was the art style of Sol Cesto that first pulled me in, now I'm hooked on the roguelite slot-machine like mechanics of it. Note: personal purchase. It's in Early Access so this is just an initial thoughts review.

Luck is the name of the game. You start off by choosing a hero and then descend ever deeper into a constantly-changing dungeon. The hook here is how the dungeon is presented, which is very much like a slot machine full of treasures and monsters. You click a row, and randomly drop into one of the squares and see the result. A chest? More money, a monster? Fight it and potentially lose some health. It's the whole risk versus reward situation having you constantly decide if another click in the current dungeon level is worth it. Pushing your luck can bring great benefits, or death.

While your movements are completely random, the way it's all presented is perfectly clear. You can tell easily at a glance what each creature can do to you, or any special abilities they have.

On each floor you have to do a minimum amount of successful movements to open the door, which allows you to move onto the next level of the dungeon. This may give you more slot-machine like picks or various other events like a bucket to drop money in to spend on permanent upgrades later, another has you stick your hand into a machine to gain more attack power and so on. I just love seeing all the artwork in this, it's awesome to look at in a creepy sort of way. The music in it definitely helps that uneasy feeling too.

The events system initially bugged me a bit though, since they're all locked behind a star progression system. Once I got the hang of it after a few runs though, their design became clear and it's all part of tickling your brain into wanting just one more run. The bucket event I mentioned, this is the key. When you lose a run and go back to the character screen, you get to spend money on the stars in the sky to expand the game and unlock more of the events system. It's actually a rather interesting progression system. But still, more events open from the start would just really help the experience.

Anyway, what's this about teeth? This game is thoroughly bizarre. One of the events you unlock early on is a statue that gives you a choice between two teeth to pull out, each having various run-altering effects that stack up as you build up your tooth collection.

You can unlock various characters, each of which have different abilities to aid you in your dungeon crawling. For example: one character can use their ability to drop into any random square vertically, rather than just picking a row and going into any square horizontally.

There's also a shop and inventory system, where you can build up a few single-use items to help you on your run. Like an arrow to fire at a specific square to remove a monster, a health potion, a shield against a single attack and more. This is again where the risk vs rewards system comes into play. Do you save your money for the shop to get items so you can get further into a run? Or, do you put loads of money into the bucket to unlock some stars when you die? Lots to think about during a run even though it's all simple single-clicking (so it's quite accessible too).

The character death animation and voice-over really make me chuckle every time too. So insanely weird. I also love the way the enemy creatures have two different animated styles between them overpowering you and being an easy kill. There's a lot of little touches to love about Sol Cesto.

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It's absolutely mesmerising.

Sol Cesto is in Early Access and works great on Desktop Linux with the latest Proton 9.0-4. The Steam Overlay didn't work though, which is a common problem with games built using web tech.