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After playing well over 200 new releases this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I feel content with the final results, despite being aware plenty of excellent games likely fell under the radar. Currently, my only nothing for me to do but sit back, unplug a little, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— ah crap, found another great game. There go my plans!

An Early Contender Emerges

In my more off-hours play, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of significant risk peril and prize. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish discovering a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Tactical Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's unlike anything I've previously experienced. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has gone missing from this mythical realm. In practice, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Select a character with their own stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, collect some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Core Mechanic

The way you truly navigate a chamber, though. Every time you begin a fresh level, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. All spaces either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you end up on is up to chance.

You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a one-in-four probability of selecting a specific tile in a row.

Then, you'll probabilities change. So do you take the risk, or do you click on a different row first and aim for less risky choices early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get its rhythm.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're more likely to land on. As an instance, you might get a perk that will reduce the probability of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I put all my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and chose every teeth I could that would improve my probability of landing on monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters each time I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but it provides ample to engage with to allow you to tweak numbers the way you want.

A Persistent Tension

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have a likely outcome to land on the desired tile but wind up hitting on an enemy that would eliminate your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and choose whether to continue selecting or to advance to the subsequent stage instead of testing fate.

Consumables including explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, just like some special skills. An adventurer's unique ability, powered up by selecting four tiles, allows players to choose a vertical line instead of a row for that move. If you play your cards right, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has another update scheduled before the full version is released. A new character and a new boss are scheduled to arrive before the conclusion of January. The official version probably isn't far behind, but the studio haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Parting Endorsement

No matter when it's fully released, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I have been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of hidden nuances and banking my earned gold per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, including new characters and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I will remain pursuing that objective when the official release drops. I'm committed for the long haul.