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After playing more than 200 recent games this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I feel content with the concluding selections, accepting that plenty of fantastic releases may have dropped by the wayside. At this point, it's plan is to other than unwind, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— ah crap, discovered one more great game. There go my plans!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

During my casual gaming time, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've come across what might become my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a conventional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of high stakes danger and payoff. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you relish in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. Mechanically, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero with their own stats and abilities, fight through each level of foes, pick up some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Novel Central System

The way you effectively complete a area, though. Each instance you begin a fresh level, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To proceed, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you select is up to chance.

You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of selecting a particular space in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. So do you go for it, or do you opt on a safer line first and aim for safer moves early? This is the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing when you acquire its rhythm.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by collecting teeth that alter which objects you're more likely to land on. As an instance, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a reward too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• On a particular session, I put all my stat upgrades toward brute force and chose every teeth possible that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters with that damage type.
• In another run, I constructed my hero around loot caches and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I claimed a reward.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but it provides ample to experiment with to enable you to influence probabilities the way you want.

An Ever-Present Tension

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There remains the possibility that you have a likely outcome to select the square you want but wind up hitting a foe that would eliminate your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you work through a stage and determine if to continue selecting or to advance to the subsequent stage as opposed to testing fate.

Items like explosive devices help cut down the chance, just like some character abilities. An adventurer's unique ability, activated once clearing four squares, allows players to select a vertical column rather than a horizontal row for that move. By employing your cards right, you can reserve that option for the right moment to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking degree of depth in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has at least one more update scheduled until the complete edition is unleashed. Another playable adventurer and a new boss are expected to drop before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release may not be much later, but the creators haven't announced a specific release window yet.

A Parting Recommendation

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I have been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its hidden nuances and storing my run rewards every session to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, featuring new characters and items purchasable during a run. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I'll continue attempting that goal when the full version launches. Sign me up for the entire experience.