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Having experienced well over 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the final results, even knowing plenty of fantastic releases may have dropped by the wayside. At this point, it's job is to but sit back, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, discovered one more amazing experience. So much for my plans!

An Early Contender Emerges

In my more casual gaming time, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a conventional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of significant risk risk and reward. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy being aware of a game before it's popular, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your gaming budget.

A Strategic Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's unlike anything I've previously experienced. The setup is that you must venture into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from its world. When you play, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Select a character possessing unique attributes and skills, clear floor after floor of foes, collect some permanent upgrades (which are teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Gameplay Loop

How you truly navigate a chamber, is unique. Each instance you enter a new floor, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To proceed, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you land in is a matter of probability.

You might see a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of selecting a specific tile in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you choose on a alternative option first and try to make safer moves early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop a feel for it.

Manipulating Probability

The procedural hook is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• In one run, I focused my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and picked as many teeth I could that would improve my probability of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• On a different attempt, I constructed my hero around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I claimed a reward.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to engage with to let you manipulate probabilities to your preference.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have a likely outcome to select the preferred space but ultimately choose on an enemy that would eliminate your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and decide when to press onward or when to move on to the next floor rather than pushing your luck.

Items like explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some character abilities. One hero's unique ability, powered up by clearing four squares, enables you to click on a vertical column in place of a horizontal row on a turn. If you play your cards right, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. You'll find an astonishing level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in development, and it has at least one more update planned until the full version is launched. An additional hero and a new boss are planned for release before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release probably isn't far behind, but the game's developers haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Thought

Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been completely engrossed with it, discovering its little secrets and saving my accumulated currency in each run to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, including new characters and items I can buy during a run. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I will remain working on that task when the full version launches. I'm committed for the long haul.