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Having experienced more than 200 recent games this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My year-end list is published, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, even knowing numerous stellar titles may have dropped by the wayside. Currently, my only nothing for me to do except relax, disconnect briefly, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— well, shoot, stumbled upon a brilliant title. There go my intentions!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

With my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've come across what could be my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a classic dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of major consequence risk and reward. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you relish discovering a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I'm familiar with. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor to find the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. In practice, this creates some familiar roguelike structure. Pick a hero with their own attributes and skills, clear floor after floor of foes, pick up some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Gameplay Loop

The way you effectively complete a chamber, however. Whenever you begin a fresh level, you see a four-by-four matrix of boxes. All spaces features a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To make a move, you just select on one of the four rows, but the exact space you select is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of selecting any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you click on a alternative option first and aim for more cautious selections early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay in action in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating after you develop its rhythm.

Manipulating Probability

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by picking up teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. For example, you could acquire a perk that will lower your chances of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• In one run, I focused my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth possible that would increase my odds of landing on monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I developed my adventurer 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 somewhat constrained, but it provides ample to experiment with to enable you to influence probabilities according to your strategy.

A Persistent Risk

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have an 80% chance to select the square you want but wind up hitting a foe that would eliminate your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and determine if to keep clicking or when to move on to the subsequent stage as opposed to pushing your luck.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, as do some special skills. An adventurer's unique ability, activated once selecting four tiles, enables you to click on a column in place of a row for that move. If you play this move wisely, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising level of strategy in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is remaining in early access, and it has another update to go until the final game is released. Another playable adventurer and a additional end-level foe are planned for release before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release may not be much later, but the creators haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Parting Recommendation

Whenever it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of small details and banking my earned gold per attempt to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, featuring additional heroes and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I suspect I'll continue attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the long haul.