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Having experienced well over 200 new releases this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I am at peace with the ultimate rankings, even knowing plenty of fantastic releases likely fell under the radar. Currently, my only plan is to other than unwind, take a short break, and perhaps take a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a great game. So much for my peaceful respite!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

With my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a conventional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of significant risk risk and reward. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you enjoy being aware of a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's unlike anything I've ever played. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, going down level by level in search of the sun, which has vanished from its world. Mechanically, this creates some familiar roguelike structure. Choose an adventurer who has stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, collect some passive buffs (in the form of teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

How you effectively complete a chamber, is unique. Each instance you begin a fresh level, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you end up on is a matter of probability.

You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a one-in-four probability of hitting any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. So do you press your luck, or do you click on a alternative option first and try to make less risky choices early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating once you get its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're more attracted to. As an instance, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a better shot at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I invested my stat upgrades toward brute force and chose every teeth I could that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I constructed my hero around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I secured loot.

The build options are not endless, but there's enough to experiment with to allow you to tweak the odds to your preference.

A Constant Risk

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There remains the possibility that you have a likely outcome to select the desired tile but end up landing a foe that would deplete your final hit point. Every move is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and choose whether to continue selecting or to advance to the subsequent stage as opposed to risking it all.

Consumables including enemy-killing bombs help cut down the chance, as do some hero powers. An adventurer's special power, charged after clearing four squares, allows players to click on a column in place of a horizontal row during that action. Should you use this move wisely, you can save that move for the right moment to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking degree of depth in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is currently in its preview phase, and it has a final update to go until the full version is launched. A new character and a additional end-level foe are expected to drop by the end of January. The full launch likely won't be much later, but the studio haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Parting Recommendation

Whenever the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of small details and storing my run rewards every session to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, such as new characters and items I can buy during a run. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I have a sense I will remain working on that task when the full version launches. I'm committed for the entire experience.