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Having experienced in excess of 200 new releases this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My year-end list is published, and I feel content with the concluding selections, even knowing numerous stellar titles may have dropped through the cracks. At this point, it's plan is to except relax, take a short break, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— oh no, discovered one more brilliant title. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

In my more casual gaming time, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've encountered what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of high stakes risk and reward. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride discovering a game before it's popular, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The concept is that you must venture into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has vanished from its world. In practice, this creates some standard crawl progression. Select a character who has stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, collect some stat improvements (which are teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Gameplay Loop

How you effectively complete a chamber, though. Every time you enter a new floor, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To proceed, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you land in is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of hitting a particular space in a row.

After that, the odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you click on a different row first and try to make more cautious selections early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating once you get a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by picking up teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. As an instance, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of getting a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout 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 melee prowess and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I built my character around reward boxes and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to engage with to let you manipulate numbers according to your strategy.

A Persistent Tension

Unsurprisingly, it remains a game of chance. There's always the chance that you have a likely outcome to select the desired tile but end up landing a foe that would take out your final hit point. Every move is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and choose whether to continue selecting or to proceed to the subsequent stage instead of testing fate.

Consumables including destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some character abilities. One hero's special power, activated once clearing four squares, enables you to click on a column rather than a horizontal row on a turn. By employing your cards right, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising degree of depth in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has another update scheduled until the complete edition is released. Another playable adventurer and a new boss are scheduled to arrive before the conclusion of January. The full launch probably isn't much later, but the studio haven't announced a final date yet.

A Concluding Thought

Regardless of when its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I have been positively obsessed with it, discovering its small details and saving my accumulated currency in each run to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, featuring fresh adventurers and items available for acquisition while playing. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I'll still be attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the long haul.