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After playing more than 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I am at peace with the concluding selections, accepting that plenty of stellar titles probably slipped through the cracks. At this point, it's job is to but sit back, take a short break, and maybe enjoy a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a great game. So much for my peaceful respite!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

In my more off-hours play, usually reserved for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across what could be my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of high stakes danger and payoff. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you relish in knowing about a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's unlike anything I've previously experienced. The setup is that you must venture into a dungeon, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. Mechanically, this creates some familiar roguelike structure. Pick a hero who has attributes and skills, clear floor after floor of foes, acquire some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Novel Central System

How you actually clear a area, though. Each instance you begin a fresh level, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you land in is a matter of probability.

You might see a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a 25% chance of hitting a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your chances are recalculated. So do you go for it, or do you choose on a safer line first and aim for less risky choices early? Herein lies the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire a feel for it.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by picking up teeth that change what things you're more attracted to. As an instance, you could acquire a perk that will reduce the probability of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• During one attempt, I put all my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
• On a different attempt, I developed my adventurer around treasure chests and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I claimed a reward.

The strategic possibilities are limited, but they are sufficient to work with to allow you to tweak numbers the way you want.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Naturally, 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 wind up hitting a monster that would eliminate your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you clear a floor out and choose whether to keep clicking or to advance to the next floor rather than testing fate.

Items like explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, as do some hero powers. An adventurer's unique ability, activated once clearing four squares, enables you to click on a vertical column instead of a row on a turn. If you play this move wisely, you can hold that ability for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. You'll find an astonishing level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is currently in its preview phase, and it has another update scheduled before the full version is released. A new character and a additional end-level foe are expected to drop sometime in January. The official version may not be far behind, but the studio haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its hidden nuances and banking my earned gold in each run to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, including new characters and items purchasable while playing. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I'll continue working on that task when the official release drops. Count me in for the long haul.