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After playing more than 200 new releases this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, even knowing numerous stellar titles probably slipped through the cracks. Now, there's plan is to except relax, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— oh no, found another great game. And just like that, goodbye to my plans!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

During my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've come across potentially my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a conventional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of major consequence peril and prize. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy discovering a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's unlike anything I'm familiar with. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor to find the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. Mechanically, that makes for some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero possessing unique stats and abilities, fight through each level of enemies, collect some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Unique Core Mechanic

The way you truly navigate a chamber, though. Every time you begin a fresh level, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces features a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you choose on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you select is determined by luck.

You might see a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of hitting a particular space in a row.

Then, you'll probabilities change. So do you go for it, or do you choose on a different row first and aim for safer moves early? This is the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop a feel for it.

Manipulating Probability

The meta-layer is that your odds can be manipulated through a run by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're more attracted to. As an instance, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers to the utmost to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• During one attempt, I invested 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.
• In another run, I developed my adventurer around treasure chests and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I secured loot.

The build options are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to experiment with to allow you to tweak numbers the way you want.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the chance that you have a likely outcome to land on the preferred space but end up landing a foe that would eliminate your final hit point. Every move is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and decide when to continue selecting or to proceed to the next floor instead of testing fate.

Tools such as explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, as do some special skills. An adventurer's unique ability, powered up by clearing four squares, enables you to select a vertical column in place of a row for that move. By employing your cards right, you can reserve that option for the right moment to circumvent a perilous selection. You'll find an astonishing degree of depth in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in development, and it has a final update scheduled until the final game is unleashed. Another playable adventurer and a new boss are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The 1.0 release likely won't be much later, but the creators haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Final Recommendation

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency every session to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, featuring new characters and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I suspect I'll still be attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the complete journey.