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Following my time with in excess of 200 new releases this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I'm satisfied with the final results, even knowing plenty of fantastic releases may have dropped by the wayside. Now, there's plan is to other than unwind, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— ah crap, discovered one more great game. And just like that, goodbye to my plans!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

In my more casual gaming time, usually reserved for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of significant risk risk and reward. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your gaming budget.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I've ever played. The setup is that you must venture into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has gone missing from this mythical realm. When you play, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Select a character possessing unique stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, acquire some permanent upgrades (which are teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Unique Central System

How you truly navigate a area, is unique. Each instance you enter a new floor, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To make a move, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you select is up to chance.

You might see a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a one-in-four probability of hitting any given square in a row.

Then, you'll odds shift. So do you press your luck, or do you choose on a different row first and attempt some more cautious selections early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop an understanding of it.

Manipulating Probability

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by gathering teeth that alter which objects you're more likely to land on. For example, you could acquire a perk that will reduce the probability of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of getting a reward too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math as best you can to have a higher chance at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I put all my attribute improvements toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I opened a chest.

The customization choices are not endless, but it provides ample to engage with to enable you to influence the odds the way you want.

A Constant Tension

Naturally, it's still a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have an 80% chance to select the preferred space but wind up hitting a monster that would deplete your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you clear a floor out and decide when to continue selecting or to advance to the following level as opposed to risking it all.

Items like destructive ordnance help cut down the chance, as do some special skills. An adventurer's signature move, activated once selecting four tiles, enables you to choose a vertical line rather than a horizontal line on a turn. Should you use this strategically, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has another update planned before the complete edition is unleashed. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are planned for release by the end of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be far behind, but the creators haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

Whenever the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been thoroughly captivated with it, finding all of small details and saving my accumulated currency in each run to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, featuring fresh adventurers and items I can buy mid-attempt. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I suspect I will remain pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Count me in for the entire experience.