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Following my time with in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My year-end list is live, and I am at peace with the ultimate rankings, accepting that a host of stellar titles likely fell under the radar. Now, there's plan is to but sit back, take a short break, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, found another great game. There go my plans!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

During my off-hours play, typically earmarked for a handful of quirky titles, I've encountered potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of major consequence danger and payoff. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you relish in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. Mechanically, this creates some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer possessing unique attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, acquire some passive buffs (which are teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

How you actually clear a dungeon room, though. Each instance you start another stage, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. Each square features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you choose on one of the four rows, but the exact space you land in is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a one-in-four probability of selecting any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. So do you press your luck, or do you opt on a alternative option first and aim for more cautious selections early? This is the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get a feel for it.

Manipulating Probability

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced during an attempt by collecting teeth that alter which objects you're drawn toward. For example, you could acquire a perk that will lower your chances of hitting a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a improved likelihood at landing where you want.
• In one run, I invested my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and picked as many teeth possible that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• On a different attempt, I built my character around treasure chests and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes every time I secured loot.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to experiment with to allow you to tweak probabilities the way you want.

A Persistent Tension

Unsurprisingly, it remains a game of chance. There remains the possibility that you have an 80% chance to hit the preferred space but end up landing a monster that would eliminate your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and choose whether to continue selecting or to advance to the subsequent stage rather than risking it all.

Tools such as destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some hero powers. A particular character's signature move, powered up by selecting four tiles, enables you to click on a vertical column instead of a horizontal row on a turn. By employing this move wisely, you can hold that ability for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. 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 another update planned until the full version is unleashed. A new character and a fresh guardian are expected to drop sometime in January. The official version likely won't be far behind, but the creators haven't announced a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

Whenever the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been thoroughly captivated with it, uncovering each of hidden nuances and storing my run rewards in each run to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, including fresh adventurers and items I can buy during a run. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I suspect I will remain pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Count me in for the long haul.