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Having experienced in excess of 200 recent games this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My year-end list is published, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, accepting that plenty of stellar titles likely fell by the wayside. Currently, my only nothing for me to do except relax, unplug a little, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— ah crap, found another amazing experience. So much for my intentions!

A Premature Front-Runner Appears

With my off-hours play, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across what might become my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a conventional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of significant risk risk and reward. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, sample Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Strategic Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I'm familiar with. The setup is that you must venture into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. In practice, this creates some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer with their own attributes and skills, fight through each level of foes, collect some stat improvements (which are teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Unique Central System

The way you effectively complete a dungeon room, though. Whenever you begin a fresh level, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you end up on is a matter of probability.

You may face a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of hitting a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. So do you press your luck, or do you opt on a different row first and attempt some more cautious selections early? Herein lies the push-your-luck gameplay on display in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing when you acquire an understanding of it.

Manipulating Probability

The procedural hook is that your odds can be manipulated through a run by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of hitting a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math to the utmost to have a better shot at selecting the optimal square.
• During one attempt, I invested my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth possible that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• On a different attempt, I built my character around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I opened a chest.

The build options are limited, but it provides ample to work with to allow you to tweak the odds the way you want.

A Persistent Gamble

Of course, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the chance that you have a high probability to hit the square you want but wind up hitting a monster that would take out your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and determine if to continue selecting or when to move on to the subsequent stage rather than pushing your luck.

Items like enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, as do some special skills. A particular character's signature move, charged after making four moves, lets gamers to select a column rather than a row for that move. By employing your cards right, you can hold that ability for the right moment to circumvent a perilous selection. You'll find an astonishing level of strategy in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is currently in early access, and it has at least one more update planned until the final game is launched. An additional hero and a new boss are expected to drop sometime in January. The 1.0 release may not be far behind, but the game's developers haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Parting Endorsement

Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I have been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its hidden nuances and banking my earned gold in each run to unlock a steady stream of permanent unlocks, such as fresh adventurers and items purchasable during a run. To this day, I have not reached the bottom, and I suspect I will remain working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the long haul.