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Following my time with more than 200 new releases this year, It's time to closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I feel content with the concluding selections, even knowing numerous stellar titles probably slipped through the cracks. Currently, my only job is to except relax, take a short break, and maybe enjoy a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, found another brilliant title. There go my peaceful respite!

An Early Contender Emerges

During my casual gaming time, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've discovered what could be my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a classic labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of significant risk peril and prize. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, sample Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your gaming budget.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The concept is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has gone missing from its world. In practice, that makes for some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero who has parameters and powers, fight through each level of foes, collect some permanent upgrades (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Central System

How you truly navigate a chamber, though. Whenever you enter a new floor, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. All spaces either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To proceed, you just select on one of the four rows, but which square you end up on is determined by luck.

You may face a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a 25% chance of hitting any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you choose on a different row first and attempt some safer moves early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire an understanding of it.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by collecting teeth that alter which objects you're more likely to land on. For example, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of getting a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a higher chance at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I put all my stat upgrades toward brute force and picked as many teeth possible that would increase my odds of landing on monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I built my character around loot caches and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I claimed a reward.

The customization choices are limited, but they are sufficient to work with to allow you to tweak numbers to your preference.

An Ever-Present Risk

Of course, it remains a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have an 80% chance to select the desired tile but wind up hitting a foe that would take out your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you clear a floor out and determine if to keep clicking or to advance to the subsequent stage as opposed to testing fate.

Items like explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some special skills. An adventurer's special power, activated once clearing four squares, lets gamers to choose a column rather than a horizontal row on a turn. If you play this move wisely, you can hold that ability for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is remaining in early access, and it has at least one more update planned until the full version is unleashed. An additional hero and a additional end-level foe are expected to drop by the end of January. The full launch probably isn't much later, but the game's developers haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

No matter when the complete game arrives, you should consider put Sol Cesto in your sights. I have been positively obsessed with it, finding all of small details and saving my accumulated currency in each run to access a constant flow of permanent unlocks, such as new characters and items available for acquisition during a run. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll continue attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the long haul.