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After playing more than 200 new releases this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My year-end list is published, and I feel content with the final results, even knowing a host of stellar titles may have dropped through the cracks. At this point, it's plan is to other than unwind, unplug a little, and perhaps take a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, stumbled upon a brilliant title. There go my plans!

A Surprising Front-Runner Appears

With my laid-back sessions, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've encountered potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of major consequence danger and payoff. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you enjoy in knowing about a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's different from everything I've previously experienced. The premise is that you must venture into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has gone missing from its world. When you play, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Select a character with their own parameters and powers, fight through each level of enemies, acquire some stat improvements (which are teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Core Mechanic

How you actually clear a dungeon room, is unique. Each instance 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 life-giving berry. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you land in is up to chance.

You may face a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of hitting a particular space in a row.

Then, you'll odds shift. So do you press your luck, or do you opt on a different row first and attempt some less risky choices early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic on display in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating when you acquire its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped during an attempt by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're more attracted to. For example, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math as best you can to have a better shot at selecting the optimal square.
• During one attempt, I put all my stat upgrades toward brute force and chose every teeth possible that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I claimed a reward.

The build options are limited, but there's enough to work with to enable you to influence probabilities according to your strategy.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have a likely outcome to land on the desired tile but ultimately choose a foe that would eliminate your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and determine if to press onward or to proceed to the next floor rather than testing fate.

Tools such as destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, as do some character abilities. One hero's special power, powered up by selecting four tiles, allows players to choose a vertical line in place of a row on a turn. Should you use your cards right, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has another update planned until the final game is unleashed. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are planned for release before the conclusion of January. The official version may not be much later, but the creators haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Thought

Whenever its 1.0 launch occurs, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I have been thoroughly captivated with it, uncovering each of small details and storing my run rewards every session to reveal a continuous trickle of permanent unlocks, such as additional heroes and items available for acquisition during a run. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I'll continue working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the long haul.