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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 live, and I'm satisfied with the ultimate rankings, even knowing numerous fantastic releases probably slipped through the cracks. Now, there's nothing for me to do except relax, take a short break, and perhaps take a refreshing hike in the— oh no, discovered one more great game. So much for my peaceful respite!

An Early Front-Runner Appears

In my more casual gaming time, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered potentially my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic labyrinth explorer into a probability-fueled game of significant risk peril and prize. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you take pride being aware of a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your gaming budget.

A Calculated Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The concept is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor to find the sun, which has gone missing from its world. In practice, that makes for some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer with their own parameters and powers, clear floor after floor of foes, pick up some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

How you truly navigate a area, however. Each instance you begin a fresh level, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the four rows, but which square you land in is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of landing on a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you opt on a safer line first and try to make more cautious selections early? That's the risk-reward dynamic in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire an understanding of it.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced during an attempt by gathering teeth that change what things you're more attracted to. For example, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I put all my attribute improvements toward brute force and picked as many teeth I could that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, I constructed my hero around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I claimed a reward.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but it provides ample to engage with to let you manipulate the odds to your preference.

A Constant Risk

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have an 80% chance to land on the square you want but wind up hitting a monster that would take out your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and choose whether to press onward or to advance to the next floor as opposed to pushing your luck.

Consumables including destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some hero powers. An adventurer's signature move, activated once selecting four tiles, allows players to click on a column in place of a row on a turn. By employing your cards right, you can save that move for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is currently in early access, and it has a final update to go until the final game is released. A new character and a fresh guardian are scheduled to arrive before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release probably isn't far behind, but the game's developers haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Final Recommendation

Whenever the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I have been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of small details and storing my run rewards per attempt to access a constant flow of permanent unlocks, featuring fresh adventurers and items I can buy mid-attempt. 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.