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Following my time with in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I feel content with the concluding selections, accepting that numerous excellent games likely fell by the wayside. Now, there's nothing for me to do except relax, disconnect briefly, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— well, shoot, discovered one more amazing experience. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

In my more off-hours play, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, 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 reimagines a conventional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of major consequence danger and payoff. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you enjoy discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I'm familiar with. The premise is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has vanished from its world. When you play, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer with their own stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of foes, pick up some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Novel Core Mechanic

The way you truly navigate a dungeon room, is unique. Each instance you begin a fresh level, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you choose on one of the four rows, but the exact space you land in is a matter of probability.

You may face a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of selecting a specific tile in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. So do you go for it, or do you opt on a alternative option first and try to make more cautious selections early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating when you acquire an understanding of it.

Manipulating Probability

The meta-layer is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by collecting teeth that alter which objects you're more likely to land on. As an instance, you might get a perk that will reduce the probability of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I put all my stat upgrades toward brute force and selected all the teeth possible that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I built my character around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but it provides ample to work with to enable you to influence numbers to your preference.

A Constant Tension

Of course, it's still a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have a likely outcome to hit the preferred space but wind up hitting on an enemy that would deplete your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you clear a floor out and decide when to continue selecting or to advance to the subsequent stage instead of testing fate.

Items like explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some character abilities. One hero's signature move, charged after clearing four squares, enables you to choose a vertical column rather than a row for that move. By employing this strategically, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has a final update to go until the complete edition is launched. A new character and a fresh guardian are expected to drop sometime in January. The 1.0 release likely won't be far behind, but the game's developers haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

No matter when the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, I've been thoroughly captivated with it, uncovering each of small details and banking my earned gold every session to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, including fresh adventurers and items available for acquisition while playing. I still haven't reached the bottom, and I suspect I will remain working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the entire experience.