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Having experienced well over 200 recent games this year, It's time to turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the ultimate rankings, even knowing numerous stellar titles may have dropped through the cracks. Now, there's nothing for me to do other than unwind, disconnect briefly, and maybe enjoy a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, stumbled upon a great game. So much for my intentions!

A Surprising Front-Runner Appears

With my casual gaming time, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've encountered what might become my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a classic dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of high stakes risk and reward. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you relish in knowing about a game before it's popular, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I've ever played. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from its world. When you play, this results in some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer with their own stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, pick up some passive buffs (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Easy to grasp!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

How you actually clear a area, however. Whenever you enter a new floor, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To proceed, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you end up on is up to chance.

You might see a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a 25% chance of selecting a particular space in a row.

Then, you'll probabilities change. So do you press your luck, or do you choose on a safer line first and attempt some more cautious selections early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get a feel for it.

Manipulating Probability

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped during an attempt by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. As an instance, you may obtain a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I invested my power boosts toward brute force and picked as many teeth I could that would improve my probability of being drawn to monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I secured loot.

The build options are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to work with to let you manipulate probabilities the way you want.

A Persistent Tension

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. There remains the possibility that you have a high probability to land on the preferred space but ultimately choose a foe that would take out your final hit point. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you clear a floor out and determine if to keep clicking or to advance to the subsequent stage as opposed to risking it all.

Consumables including destructive ordnance help cut down the chance, similar to some character abilities. A particular character's special power, powered up by clearing four squares, enables you to click on a column instead of a horizontal row for that move. If you play this strategically, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is currently in early access, and it has a final update planned until the final game is unleashed. A new character and a additional end-level foe are planned for release by the end of January. The 1.0 release may not be far behind, but the studio haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Thought

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been positively obsessed with it, discovering its hidden nuances and storing my run rewards per attempt to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, such as additional heroes and items purchasable mid-attempt. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I suspect I'll still be pursuing that objective when the official release drops. Count me in for the long haul.