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Following my time with in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I feel content with the final results, even knowing plenty of fantastic releases may have dropped under the radar. Currently, my only plan is to but sit back, take a short break, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, stumbled upon a great game. There go my intentions!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

During my casual gaming time, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a traditional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of high stakes danger and payoff. View this a preview for the in-the-know: If you enjoy in knowing about a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Tactical Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I've ever played. The premise is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. In practice, this creates some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer with their own stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, acquire some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Simple enough!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

How you actually clear a chamber, though. Each instance you start another stage, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you end up on is a matter of probability.

You may face 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 a specific tile in a row.

After that, the chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you choose on a different row first and attempt some less risky choices early? This is the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing when you acquire an understanding of it.

Manipulating Probability

The meta-layer is that your odds can be manipulated during an attempt by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. For example, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a higher chance at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I focused my power boosts toward brute force and picked as many teeth possible that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I secured loot.

The customization choices are not endless, but it provides ample to experiment with to allow you to tweak the odds according to your strategy.

A Constant Gamble

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. There's always the chance that you have a high probability to land on the square you want but ultimately choose on an enemy that would deplete your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and decide when to continue selecting or to advance to the next floor as opposed to pushing your luck.

Items like destructive ordnance aid in reducing the chance, as do some hero powers. An adventurer's unique ability, charged after selecting four tiles, allows players to choose a column in place of a row during that action. Should you use your cards right, you can hold that ability for the right moment to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising level of strategy in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in development, and it has another update planned until the full version is released. A new character and a additional end-level foe are scheduled to arrive before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release may not be far behind, but the studio haven't announced a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Thought

Regardless of when it's fully released, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I have been completely engrossed with it, discovering its small details and banking my earned gold every session to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, featuring additional heroes and items I can buy while playing. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I suspect I'll still be working on that task when the full version launches. Count me in for the long haul.