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Following my time with in excess of 200 new releases this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is published, and I am at peace with the final results, despite being aware a host of excellent games may have dropped through the cracks. Now, there's nothing for me to do but sit back, take a short break, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, stumbled upon a amazing experience. So much for my peaceful respite!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

With my laid-back sessions, typically earmarked for a few oddball curiosities, I've discovered what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a conventional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of high stakes risk and reward. Consider this an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride being aware of a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's unlike anything I'm familiar with. The premise is that you must venture into a dungeon, descending floor after floor to find the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. In practice, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer possessing unique attributes and skills, clear floor after floor of foes, collect some permanent upgrades (which are teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Easy to grasp!

The Distinctive Central System

The way you effectively complete a dungeon room, is unique. Each instance you enter a new floor, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To explore a room, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you land in is a matter of probability.

You might see a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a one-in-four probability of selecting any given square in a row.

After that, the chances are recalculated. So do you go for it, or do you click on a different row first and try to make safer moves early? Herein lies the push-your-luck gameplay 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 gathering teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will lower your chances of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a higher chance at getting your desired outcome.
• On a particular session, I focused my stat upgrades toward brute force and picked as many teeth possible that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters aligned with that strength.
• On a different attempt, I constructed my hero around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but it provides ample to experiment with to let you manipulate numbers the way you want.

An Ever-Present Tension

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have a likely outcome to land on the desired tile but end up landing on an enemy that would take out your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you clear a floor out and determine if to continue selecting or to advance to the following level as opposed to risking it all.

Items like explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, just like some character abilities. One hero's unique ability, powered up by selecting four tiles, lets gamers to select a vertical line instead of a horizontal row for that move. Should you use your cards right, you can save that move for a crucial point to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has another update planned before the complete edition is unleashed. Another playable adventurer and a additional end-level foe are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The 1.0 release may not be long after, but the studio haven't announced a final date yet.

A Final Recommendation

Whenever it's fully released, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its small details and storing my run rewards in each run to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, such as fresh adventurers and items purchasable mid-attempt. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I suspect I'll continue working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the entire experience.