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Following my time with well over 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to closing the book on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I am at peace with the ultimate rankings, despite being aware plenty of fantastic releases likely fell by the wayside. Now, there's nothing for me to do but sit back, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a amazing experience. So much for my peaceful respite!

An Early Front-Runner Appears

With my casual gaming time, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've come across what might become my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of significant risk danger and payoff. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I've ever played. The premise is that you must venture into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. In practice, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Select a character who has stats and abilities, fight through each level of foes, pick up some passive buffs (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp!

The Distinctive Core Mechanic

The way you effectively complete a area, is unique. Each instance you start another stage, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a loot box, 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 two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a one-in-four probability of hitting a particular space in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. So do you press your luck, or do you choose on a different row first and try to make more cautious selections early? That's the risk-reward dynamic on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by gathering teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of getting a reward too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math optimally to have a higher chance at getting your desired outcome.
• On a particular session, I invested my power boosts toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth I could that would increase my odds of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I constructed my hero around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I secured loot.

The customization choices are not endless, but there's enough to experiment with to allow you to tweak the odds to your preference.

A Constant Risk

Of course, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have an 80% chance to hit the preferred space but ultimately choose a monster that would deplete your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you navigate a level and choose whether to press onward or to proceed to the following level instead of pushing your luck.

Consumables including enemy-killing bombs help cut down the chance, just like some hero powers. One hero's signature move, activated once clearing four squares, allows players to choose a vertical column instead of a horizontal row on a turn. If you play this move wisely, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising degree of depth in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in development, and it has another update scheduled before the final game is unleashed. An additional hero and a additional end-level foe are scheduled to arrive before the conclusion of January. The full launch likely won't be far behind, but the studio haven't announced a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Thought

Whenever the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of little secrets and storing my run rewards in each run to access a constant flow of permanent unlocks, such as fresh adventurers and items I can buy during a run. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I suspect I will remain attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the complete journey.