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Following my time with more than 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is published, and I'm satisfied with the final results, accepting that a host of excellent games probably slipped under the radar. Currently, my only job is to but sit back, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, discovered one more brilliant title. So much for my intentions!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

In my more laid-back sessions, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've come across what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of significant risk danger and payoff. Consider this an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy in knowing about a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's unlike anything I've ever played. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, going down level by level on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from its world. When you play, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Pick a hero who has stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of monsters, acquire some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Simple enough!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

How you effectively complete a dungeon room, is unique. Every time you start another stage, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. All spaces holds a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the exact space you end up on is determined by luck.

You could encounter a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of landing on a particular space in a row.

Subsequently, your chances are recalculated. So do you take the risk, or do you choose on a safer line first and aim for more cautious selections early? That's the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating once you get its rhythm.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by gathering teeth that alter which objects you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will lower your chances of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a improved likelihood at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I invested my stat upgrades toward brute force and picked as many teeth possible that would increase my odds of landing on monsters aligned with that strength.
• In another run, I developed my adventurer around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I claimed a reward.

The build options are not endless, but they are sufficient to experiment with to enable you to influence numbers according to your strategy.

A Constant Risk

Of course, it's still a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have a high probability to select the preferred space but end up landing a monster that would take out your final hit point. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and determine if to press onward or to proceed to the subsequent stage as opposed to risking it all.

Consumables including explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, just like some special skills. An adventurer's unique ability, powered up by making four moves, lets gamers to click on a vertical line instead of a horizontal row on a turn. If you play your cards right, you can save that move for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has another update to go before the final game is released. A new character and a new boss are expected to drop by the end of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be much later, but the game's developers haven't set a final date yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

Whenever its 1.0 launch occurs, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, discovering its small details and storing my run rewards every session to unlock a steady stream of permanent unlocks, 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 still be pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the long haul.