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Having experienced in excess of 200 recent games this year, It's time to closing the book on 2025. My year-end list is live, and I'm satisfied with the final results, despite being aware numerous excellent games probably slipped through the cracks. At this point, it's plan is to except relax, take a short break, and maybe enjoy a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, stumbled upon a great game. And just like that, goodbye to my intentions!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

During my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered 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 dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of major consequence peril and prize. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I've previously experienced. 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 creates some standard crawl progression. Select a character who has parameters and powers, fight through each level of enemies, collect some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Central System

The method by which you actually clear a dungeon room, though. Every time you enter a new floor, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you end up on is a matter of probability.

You might see a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a quarter likelihood of hitting a specific tile in a row.

Then, you'll probabilities change. So do you take the risk, or do you choose on a different row first and try to make more cautious selections early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating after you develop its rhythm.

Manipulating Probability

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will reduce the probability of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a better shot at selecting the optimal square.
• In one run, I invested my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth possible that would improve my probability of landing on monsters aligned with that strength.
• In another run, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I secured loot.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but they are sufficient to experiment with to enable you to influence probabilities to your preference.

A Persistent Gamble

Of course, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the possibility that you have an 80% chance to land on the square you want but ultimately choose a foe that would take out your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and decide when to continue selecting or to advance to the following level instead of testing fate.

Consumables including destructive ordnance help cut down the chance, similar to some character abilities. One hero's signature move, charged after making four moves, enables you to click on a vertical line rather than a horizontal row on a turn. By employing your cards right, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is currently in early access, and it has another update scheduled until the final game is launched. An additional hero and a additional end-level foe are expected to drop before the conclusion of January. The full launch probably isn't long after, but the game's developers haven't set a final date yet.

A Final Recommendation

No matter when it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been positively obsessed with it, discovering its hidden nuances and banking my earned gold in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, such as new characters and items purchasable during a run. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I'll still be attempting that goal when the official release drops. Sign me up for the long haul.