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After playing in excess of 200 new releases this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is published, and I'm satisfied with the final results, despite being aware a host of excellent games probably slipped under the radar. Currently, my only plan is to but sit back, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— oh no, stumbled upon a brilliant title. So much for my intentions!

A Premature Contender Emerges

With my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a handful of quirky titles, I've encountered potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of major consequence peril and prize. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish discovering a game before it's popular, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. In practice, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero with their own stats and abilities, fight through each level of enemies, pick up some passive buffs (which are teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Gameplay Loop

The way you truly navigate a chamber, is unique. Every time you begin a fresh level, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you land in is a matter of probability.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a 25% chance of landing on any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your chances are recalculated. So do you go for it, or do you choose on a safer line first and try to make more cautious selections early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating when you acquire an understanding of it.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your odds can be manipulated through a run by picking up teeth that change what things you're more attracted to. For example, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers to the utmost to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I focused my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth possible that would increase my odds of being drawn to monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, I built my character around treasure chests and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters each time I opened a chest.

The build options are not endless, but it provides ample to experiment with to enable you to influence the odds according to your strategy.

An Ever-Present Tension

Of course, it's still a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have an 80% chance to hit the preferred space but ultimately choose a foe that would eliminate your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and decide when to press onward or to proceed to the next floor instead of testing fate.

Items like explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, just like some special skills. A particular character's unique ability, powered up by making four moves, enables you to select a column in place of a row on a turn. If you play this strategically, you can save that move for the right moment to avoid a risky decision. You'll find an astonishing amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has at least one more update scheduled before the full version is unleashed. A new character and a new boss are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The full launch probably isn't much later, but the studio haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Recommendation

Whenever the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I have been positively obsessed with it, discovering its hidden nuances and banking my earned gold in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, such as new characters and items purchasable during a run. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I have a sense I will remain working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the long haul.