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After playing in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I am officially wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I am at peace 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 maybe enjoy a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, discovered one more great game. There go my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Front-Runner Appears

In my more casual gaming time, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a conventional dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of major consequence peril and prize. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride being aware of a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your gaming budget.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's unlike anything I've previously experienced. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. Mechanically, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer possessing unique attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, acquire some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Core Mechanic

How you effectively complete a dungeon room, though. Whenever you enter a new floor, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. All spaces either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To proceed, 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 a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of selecting a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you choose on a different row first and aim for safer moves early? This is the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get an understanding of it.

Manipulating Probability

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped during an attempt by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're drawn toward. As an instance, you may obtain a perk that will lower your chances of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of getting a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I put all my power boosts toward physical attack/defense and picked as many teeth I could that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I constructed my hero around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I secured loot.

The build options are limited, but it provides ample to experiment with to enable you to influence numbers the way you want.

An Ever-Present Risk

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have a likely outcome to land on the preferred space but ultimately choose a monster that would deplete your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you navigate a level and choose whether to press onward or when to move on to the subsequent stage rather than testing fate.

Items like destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, just like some hero powers. One hero's special power, powered up by making four moves, enables you to choose a column in place of a horizontal line for that move. If you play this move wisely, you can save that move for an optimal time to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has a final update scheduled until the complete edition is launched. A new character and a new boss are planned for release by the end of January. The full launch probably isn't long after, but the studio haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Parting Recommendation

Whenever its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been completely engrossed with it, uncovering each of small details and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, such as fresh adventurers and items purchasable during a run. To this day, I have not reached the bottom, and I have a sense I'll continue attempting that goal when the official release drops. Count me in for the long haul.