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Following my time with in excess of 200 recent games this year, It's time to turning the page on 2025. My year-end list is live, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, despite being aware a host of fantastic releases likely fell through the cracks. At this point, it's nothing for me to do except relax, unplug a little, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a great game. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

During my off-hours play, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've discovered potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a conventional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of major consequence peril and prize. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you enjoy being aware of a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your wallet for unique titles.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has gone missing from this mythical realm. When you play, this results in some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero with their own stats and abilities, fight through each level of enemies, collect some passive buffs (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Gameplay Loop

The way you actually clear a dungeon room, however. Whenever you enter a new floor, the game presents a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces holds a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you just select on one of the four rows, but the exact space you end up on is determined by luck.

You might see a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a one-in-four probability of selecting a particular space in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you opt on a different row first and try to make safer moves early? This is the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop its rhythm.

Manipulating Probability

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by picking up teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. For example, you may obtain a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• 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.
• During a separate session, I constructed my hero around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I secured loot.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but it provides ample to experiment with to let you manipulate probabilities to your preference.

A Constant Tension

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There remains the possibility that you have a likely outcome to select the desired tile but wind up hitting a foe that would take out your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you clear a floor out and decide when to press onward or to advance to the subsequent stage as opposed to pushing your luck.

Items like destructive ordnance aid in reducing the chance, just like some special skills. One hero's signature move, charged after making four moves, enables you to choose a vertical line instead of a horizontal row for that move. By employing your cards right, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. You'll find an astonishing degree of depth in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has a final update to go until the full version is unleashed. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are expected to drop by the end of January. The official version probably isn't much later, but the game's developers haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Thought

Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I have been completely engrossed with it, finding all of little secrets and storing my run rewards in each run to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, featuring additional heroes and items I can buy while playing. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I suspect I will remain attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the entire experience.