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After playing more than 200 new releases this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is published, and I feel content with the concluding selections, accepting that numerous stellar titles probably slipped by the wayside. Now, there's nothing for me to do except relax, unplug a little, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, discovered one more amazing experience. There go my peaceful respite!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

During my off-hours play, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered what could be my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a traditional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of major consequence danger and payoff. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride being aware of a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's unlike anything I've previously experienced. The concept is that you must venture into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. In practice, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer who has attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, pick up some permanent upgrades (represented as teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp!

The Distinctive Core Mechanic

How you truly navigate a dungeon room, however. Whenever you start another stage, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To explore a room, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you end up on is determined by luck.

You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a 25% chance of selecting any given square in a row.

Then, you'll probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you opt on a different row first and attempt some safer moves early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop an understanding of it.

Manipulating Probability

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by picking up teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will reduce the probability of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about manipulating math optimally to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I invested my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and chose every teeth possible that would improve my probability of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• On a different attempt, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but it provides ample to engage with to let you manipulate numbers according to your strategy.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Naturally, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have a likely outcome to land on the square you want but wind up hitting a foe that would take out your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you navigate a level and determine if to press onward or to proceed to the following level rather than pushing your luck.

Items like explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, similar to some character abilities. One hero's unique ability, powered up by selecting four tiles, enables you to choose a column in place of a horizontal line during that action. If you play this move wisely, you can save that move for an optimal time to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising degree of depth in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is remaining in early access, and it has a final update to go until the final game is unleashed. A new character and a new boss are expected to drop sometime in January. The 1.0 release likely won't be far behind, but the game's developers haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Concluding Thought

No matter when it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of small details and storing my run rewards per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, such as additional heroes and items I can buy during a run. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I suspect I'll still be pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Sign me up for the entire experience.