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After playing in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the final results, even knowing a host of excellent games may have dropped by the wayside. At this point, it's nothing for me to do but sit back, take a short break, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— oh no, discovered one more great game. There go my plans!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

With my off-hours play, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a classic labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of significant risk danger and payoff. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you enjoy discovering a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can make a dent in your wallet for unique titles.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I'm familiar with. The premise is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. When you play, this results in some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero who has parameters and powers, clear floor after floor of enemies, pick up some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Easy to grasp!

The Unique Central System

The way you actually clear a dungeon room, is unique. Every time you start another stage, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. All spaces holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To proceed, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you select is a matter of probability.

You could encounter a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a quarter likelihood of hitting any given square in a row.

Then, you'll probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you choose on a alternative option first and attempt some more cautious selections early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay in action in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating when you acquire its rhythm.

Manipulating Probability

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by collecting teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. For example, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about manipulating math optimally to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I focused my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and chose every teeth I could that would increase my odds of being drawn to monsters aligned with that strength.
• On a different attempt, I developed my adventurer around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but they are sufficient to engage with to let you manipulate numbers to your preference.

A Constant Gamble

Of course, it remains a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have an 80% chance to select the preferred space but ultimately choose a monster that would take out your final hit point. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and determine if to keep clicking or to proceed to the next floor rather than pushing your luck.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, just like some character abilities. An adventurer's signature move, charged after selecting four tiles, enables you to choose a column rather than a row during that action. If you play your cards right, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has at least one more update to go before the complete edition is launched. A new character and a additional end-level foe are expected to drop by the end of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be far behind, but the game's developers haven't announced a final date yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

Whenever the complete game arrives, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, discovering its little secrets and saving my accumulated currency in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, including new characters and items available for acquisition while playing. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I have a sense I'll continue working on that task when the full version launches. I'm committed for the entire experience.