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Having experienced in excess of 200 new releases this year, It's time to turning the page on 2025. My year-end list is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the ultimate rankings, even knowing numerous excellent games may have dropped under the radar. Now, there's nothing for me to do but sit back, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— ah crap, discovered one more great game. There go my peaceful respite!

A Premature Contender Emerges

In my more casual gaming time, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across potentially 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 risk and reward. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's unlike anything I'm familiar with. The premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. In practice, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Pick a hero possessing unique attributes and skills, clear floor after floor of enemies, pick up some stat improvements (which are teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Central System

How you truly navigate a chamber, though. Whenever you enter a new floor, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you land in is determined by luck.

You may face a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a quarter likelihood of hitting any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you click on a alternative option first and aim for safer moves early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating once you get a feel for it.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're more attracted to. As an instance, you might get a perk that will reduce the probability of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I put all my stat upgrades toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would increase my odds of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I built my character around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I secured loot.

The customization choices are not endless, but there's enough to work with to let you manipulate the odds to your preference.

A Constant Tension

Of course, it remains a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have an 80% chance to land on the desired tile but end up landing a foe that would deplete your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and determine if to press onward or when to move on to the subsequent stage as opposed to risking it all.

Consumables including explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some character abilities. One hero's unique ability, charged after making four moves, lets gamers to click on a vertical column in place of a horizontal line on a turn. If you play your cards right, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to sidestep a dangerous choice. You'll find an astonishing level of strategy in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has at least one more update scheduled until the final game is unleashed. Another playable adventurer and a additional end-level foe are expected to drop by the end of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be much later, but the studio haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of small details and storing my run rewards per attempt to unlock a steady stream of permanent unlocks, including new characters and items available for acquisition during a run. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll continue pursuing that objective when the official release drops. I'm committed for the long haul.