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Following my time with well over 200 recent games this year, I'm formally closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I'm satisfied with the final results, even knowing plenty of fantastic releases probably slipped under the radar. Now, there's nothing for me to do except relax, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a brilliant title. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

In my more off-hours play, typically earmarked for a handful of quirky titles, I've discovered potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a classic labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of significant risk risk and reward. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish being aware of a game before it hits the mainstream, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The setup is that you are tasked with descending 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 standard crawl progression. Select a character possessing unique parameters and powers, fight through each level of enemies, pick up some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Unique Central System

The method by which you effectively complete a chamber, though. Each instance you begin a fresh level, you see a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To proceed, you just select on one of the four rows, but which square you land in is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a 25% chance of selecting a specific tile in a row.

After that, the odds shift. So do you take the risk, or do you click on a alternative option first and aim for less risky choices early? That's the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get an understanding of it.

Influencing Chance

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by gathering teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. For example, you might get a perk that will reduce the probability of hitting a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about manipulating math to the utmost to have a higher chance at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I invested my power boosts toward physical attack/defense and picked as many teeth possible that would increase my odds of landing on monsters aligned with that strength.
• On a different attempt, I built my character around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I secured loot.

The build options are limited, but it provides ample to work with to allow you to tweak the odds the way you want.

An Ever-Present Risk

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have a high probability to select the square you want but end up landing a foe that would eliminate your final hit point. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and decide when to keep clicking or when to move on to the following level as opposed to testing fate.

Consumables including enemy-killing bombs help cut down the chance, just like some character abilities. An adventurer's signature move, charged after making four moves, allows players to choose a vertical column instead of a row on a turn. By employing your cards right, you can save that move for the right moment to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has a final update to go until the complete edition is unleashed. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are planned for release before the conclusion of January. The full launch probably isn't much later, but the game's developers haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

Whenever it's fully released, you should consider put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its small details and banking my earned gold per attempt to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, such as new characters and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll still be pursuing that objective when the official release drops. I'm committed for the entire experience.