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Following my time with well over 200 fresh titles this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My annual roundup is published, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, despite being aware numerous stellar titles likely fell under the radar. Now, there's job is to except relax, take a short break, and maybe enjoy a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, discovered one more amazing experience. So much for my intentions!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

During my laid-back sessions, typically earmarked for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a classic dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of high stakes peril and prize. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride discovering a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your gaming budget.

A Strategic Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from its world. Mechanically, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Pick a hero possessing unique attributes and skills, fight through each level of enemies, collect some passive buffs (which are teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Novel Central System

The method by which you effectively complete a dungeon room, however. Each instance you enter a new floor, you see a four-by-four matrix of boxes. All spaces holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you just select on one of the four rows, but which square you land in is determined by luck.

You may face a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of landing on any given square in a row.

Then, you'll odds shift. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you click on a safer line first and aim for less risky choices early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop an understanding of it.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math as best you can to have a higher chance at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I focused my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and picked as many teeth I could that would improve my probability of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
• On a different attempt, I constructed my hero around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to engage with to let you manipulate probabilities according to your strategy.

A Constant Tension

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have an 80% chance to hit the square you want but end up landing a monster that would take out your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you clear a floor out and decide when to press onward or to proceed to the next floor as opposed to pushing your luck.

Consumables including explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, similar to some character abilities. An adventurer's signature move, powered up by clearing four squares, allows players to choose a vertical line instead of a horizontal row on a turn. Should you use your cards right, you can save that move for the right moment to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has another update scheduled until the full version is released. An additional hero and a new boss are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be much later, but the studio haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

No matter when the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of little secrets and storing my run rewards in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, including new characters and items I can buy during a run. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I'll continue working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the long haul.