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Following my time with in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, accepting that numerous fantastic releases probably slipped by the wayside. At this point, it's plan is to other than unwind, unplug a little, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— oh no, stumbled upon a amazing experience. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

With my casual gaming time, typically earmarked for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across potentially my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a classic labyrinth explorer into a probability-fueled game of high stakes peril and prize. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you enjoy being aware of a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your wallet for unique titles.

A Calculated Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The setup is that you must venture into a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. In practice, this creates some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer who has stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of enemies, acquire some passive buffs (in the form of teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Easy to grasp!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

The way you truly navigate a chamber, however. Whenever you enter a new floor, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, 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 two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of hitting a particular space in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. So do you go for it, or do you click on a different row first and try to make safer moves early? This is the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire an understanding of it.

Shaping the Odds

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by picking up teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. For example, you could acquire a perk that will reduce the probability of encountering a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a reward too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math optimally to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• During one attempt, I put all my power boosts toward melee prowess and chose every teeth possible that would improve my probability of landing on monsters aligned with that strength.
• In another run, I built my character around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I secured loot.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to experiment with to enable you to influence numbers to your preference.

A Constant Gamble

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have an 80% chance to select the square you want but wind up hitting a foe that would take out your remaining life. Every move is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and choose whether to continue selecting or when to move on to the following level instead of pushing your luck.

Consumables including enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, as do some character abilities. An adventurer's signature move, activated once selecting four tiles, lets gamers to click on a vertical line rather than a row for that move. By employing this move wisely, you can save that move for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in development, and it has a final update planned before the complete edition is released. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are expected to drop before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release probably isn't far behind, but the studio haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

No matter when it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I have been thoroughly captivated with it, uncovering each of little secrets and banking my earned gold in each run to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, such as additional heroes and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll continue attempting that goal when the official release drops. I'm committed for the long haul.