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Having experienced more than 200 new releases this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My year-end list is published, and I feel content with the final results, despite being aware a host of excellent games probably slipped through the cracks. At this point, it's nothing for me to do except relax, unplug a little, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— ah crap, discovered one more amazing experience. There go my intentions!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

With my laid-back sessions, typically earmarked for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down 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 relish discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's a departure from all I've ever played. The setup 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. Choose an adventurer who has attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, acquire some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Central System

The way you truly navigate a area, is unique. Whenever you begin a fresh level, the game presents a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile 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 start with a quarter likelihood of selecting any given square in a row.

After that, the odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you opt on a safer line first and aim for safer moves early? This is the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get a feel for it.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped during an attempt by collecting teeth that alter which objects you're more attracted to. As an instance, you might get a perk that will reduce the probability of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of getting a reward too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a better shot at landing where you want.
• In one run, I invested my power boosts toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth possible that would improve my probability of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
• On a different attempt, I developed my adventurer around reward boxes and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I secured loot.

The build options are limited, but it provides ample to experiment with to enable you to influence numbers according to your strategy.

A Persistent Tension

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have an 80% chance to hit the square you want but end up landing a foe that would deplete your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and choose whether to keep clicking or when to move on to the following level as opposed to pushing your luck.

Items like destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some special skills. An adventurer's signature move, powered up by making four moves, lets gamers to choose a vertical line rather than a horizontal row for that move. Should you use this strategically, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has another update planned until the final game is launched. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are planned for release by the end of January. The official version may not be much later, but the studio haven't announced a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Thought

No matter when it's fully released, you ought to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of hidden nuances and banking my earned gold per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of permanent unlocks, including new characters and items I can buy while playing. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I will remain working on that task when the official release drops. Count me in for the complete journey.