Early access Sol Cesto showed me a game with a lot of potential.
The initial presentation is really nice: cool as hell art design and animations plus an intriguing albeit familiar setting, dungeon crawling, which never gets old. The gameplay is based on gambling but also very original, turn based, you interact and automatically "battle" the enemy in a grid with 4 lines each divided in 4 blocks and luck determines on which block you end up. Generally you want to battle only enemies you can kill without taking damages, or just get a heal or treasure. Initially you can't alter the percentages much but floor after floor you'll be able to use modifiers to alter those so you can go on as much as possible.
Sounds complicated if written down but in reality is a very basic gameplay, which unfortunately also has the problem of having runs being too much similar to each other even when using some different characters or going for different modifiers. Every floor of every run is different from each other but the randomizing is just a shuffle and you still get a very, very familiar distribution of enemies. For a roguelite I feel like this is a big issue, since it just kills the desire to keep going and finding renewed joy and fun in each run.
I appreciated the game having an handful of cleverly hidden secrets here and there, many rooms have interesting ways of being interacted with, even if it doesn't seem so at first.
All in all I don't feel like calling wasted potential on this game but it's difficult to truly recommend.

I was drawn into this game initially from the art and the unique premise. It had some beautiful unsettling hand drawn cartoonish art with some old medieval and almost Aztec-like style undertones. The premise, which I hadn't encountered yet in my time gaming, sounded like a fun gimmick. You drop a hero unit into rows and the tiles in these rows have a listed "chance" that your hero lands in that spot. Tiles contain monsters, traps, or positive loot (such as money or health restoring berries). Every time you attack a monster its blue/red strength stat is compared against yours and a negative difference will damage your hero. You die when your health reaches zero and so the entire goal is to "luck" into good tiles and hopefully have a plan when you slam into the bad ones. You are able to mitigate this luck based system by altering the percentages for certain tiles. Have a larger red based stat and can kill red monsters more easily? Perfect, grab upgrades the increase your chances towards landing on red monsters and decrease landing on blue monsters. Like chests and money? You can grab upgrades to increase chances to land on chest tiles. It seemed there were ways to mitigate the luck and make a "build" and so I thought it could be a fun system to explore. Unfortunately, Sol Cesto quickly began to be a slog full of bad design choices with the realization that for me, the game was too simple.

So what's wrong with the game? The most glaring problem? Not enough complexity to the point where every decision feels quick and automatic. It gets to the point where every run feels like you're on auto pilot and its not a game anymore. I wonder, do I pick the row that has two trap tiles, a blue 4 strength monster, and a strawberry? Or the row with two chests and two 3-strength red monsters? And my hero started with more red strength than blue? Well obviously option 2. Once you start eliminating the obvious safer choices, it will funnel you to the next most obvious choice. "well I've eliminated the row with 3 safe tiles and 1 bad, my next call is to choose to drop on the row with 3 bad and 1 safe, or the row with 2 bad and 2 safe." Every further decision functions like this decision tree. You are always given an obvious choice because its the least bad choice available. There are a few mechanics that try to "mix" up this decision tree matrix. Such as the sun ability on your hero or special monster abilities. But because the base stat system is so basic (only 2 stats that you barely upgrade/alter), they don't have a meaningful effect. For example, there is a red 3 strength bird monster that gains strength every time a weaker red 1 strength egg monster is killed. So the thought process is obvious. If you have a high red strength hero, than try to luck into killing those monsters first, before you move on to kill the egg monsters. Sometimes you accidentally kill a couple eggs, even when picking the rows with the bird monsters in them, and so you then avoid rows with the bird because they've become too strong. If you're a hero with low red strength, don't bother eliminating the birds and kill other things. After making this realization the first time about the 4-strength bird monster, every encounter then requires very little evaluation. And so you can see, EVERY monster feels like this. This is the game on almost every decision though. Not just what row to drop in. What upgrades to pick, what items to buy, how to fight a boss monster. Its all so simplified and watered down. The game just needs MORE. and a revamp of how the luck mitigation system works.

What's the next biggest problem? The grind and the locked content. Oh my god. The grind. Its agonizingly slow. I only played around 3.6 hours and I felt like I had played 20. Every rogue-lite upgrade requires an absurd amount of coins for things that I thought should have been unlocked from the start. The shops in the game only sell 2 items. Want more? Its an upgrade you've got to dump coins on. Statues that offer upgrades that change the luck. Well they also only start with 2 choices. Want to have more? Dump coins. A starting hero doesn't have the basic talent unlocked. Dump coins. The well, which offers positive in run benefits from item choices? Well it only starts with a pool of like 3 items. Want more. Dump coins. It's ridiculous. It's not bad because game content is locked behind earned currency. That's just the format of a roguelite and I like roguelites. The problem is that there isn't enough content and mechanics to start off with to justify slow rolling everything else. The point of the roguelite system is to introduce mechanics and content more slowly over time to players so they don't get overwhelmed and learn the game better. Its a way to smooth out the learning curve. To still make a game really complex but ease players into that complexity. If you don't start with a lot of complexity though, than its just a frustrating and boring experience.

There are a number of other issues not worth paragraphing about such as:
- Bad starting characters
- Uninspiring upgrade system
- Cryptic hidden unlocks
- Lack of boss variety
- Badly executed procedural generation

But the other issues above are what really hold this game back.


The sad part of this whole thing, is that the bones of this game are interesting. I like the concept and the art is fantastic. But the execution is just not good.
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TL;DR

3/10. A game that lacks interesting decisions because it's systems are too simple. Combine that with the fact it has you grind to unlock things that should of been in the start, and you get a frustrating slog that isn't fun to play. It has amazing art and an interesting premise, but it doesn't deliver a rewarding experience. Stay away from this one. There are SO many roguelites for around the same money that are really fun.

The best experience is during the first 20 hrs, then you get used to the game and notice that you should always go for increase health, increase healing rather than anything else for all the playable characters. The best shop item is the toothpaste, it make all the negative side-affect effectively meaningless.