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Following my time with well over 200 new releases this year, It's time to turning the page on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I am at peace with the final results, even knowing a host of excellent games may have dropped under the radar. At this point, it's nothing for me to do except relax, disconnect briefly, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— well, shoot, stumbled upon a great game. There go my intentions!

A Premature Contender Emerges

During my off-hours play, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered what might become my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a classic labyrinth explorer into a probability-fueled game of high stakes risk and reward. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you enjoy being aware of a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your gaming budget.

A Calculated Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's unlike anything I'm familiar with. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. When you play, this results in some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero with their own parameters and powers, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, acquire some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Easy to grasp!

The Distinctive Gameplay Loop

The method by which you actually clear a chamber, though. Each instance you begin a fresh level, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To make a move, you just select on one of the four rows, but the exact space you end up on is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a quarter likelihood of hitting a particular space in a row.

Then, you'll probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you opt on a different row first and attempt some less risky choices early? This is the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped during an attempt by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. For example, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about manipulating math to the utmost to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• In one run, I put all my stat upgrades toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would increase my odds of being drawn to monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I opened a chest.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to experiment with to let you manipulate numbers the way you want.

An Ever-Present Risk

Of course, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the risk that you have an 80% chance to land on the square you want but ultimately choose a foe that would deplete your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you clear a floor out and decide when to continue selecting or when to move on to the subsequent stage instead of testing fate.

Items like enemy-killing bombs help cut down the chance, similar to some character abilities. One hero's signature move, powered up by selecting four tiles, lets gamers to click on a vertical line rather than a horizontal row for that move. If you play your cards right, you can hold that ability for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising degree of depth in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has a final update planned before the complete edition is launched. Another playable adventurer and a new boss are planned for release before the conclusion of January. The full launch likely won't be long after, but the studio haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Recommendation

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been thoroughly captivated with it, uncovering each of small details and storing my run rewards every session to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, such as new characters and items I can buy while playing. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I get the feeling I'll still be pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Count me in for the entire experience.