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After playing in excess of 200 new releases this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is published, and I feel content with the concluding selections, despite being aware a host of excellent games likely fell under the radar. Now, there's nothing for me to do except relax, unplug a little, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— ah crap, found another amazing experience. So much for my plans!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

With my casual gaming time, typically earmarked for a handful of quirky titles, I've encountered what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a conventional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of significant risk risk and reward. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you enjoy discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's unlike anything I've previously experienced. The premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. When you play, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero with their own attributes and skills, clear floor after floor of foes, collect some permanent upgrades (represented as teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Unique Core Mechanic

How you truly navigate a dungeon room, is unique. Every time you enter a new floor, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To make a move, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you select is determined by luck.

You may face a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of selecting a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. So do you press your luck, or do you click on a different row first and attempt some safer moves early? That's the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating after you develop its rhythm.

Influencing Chance

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of getting a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• During one attempt, I put all my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth possible that would increase my odds of being drawn to monsters with that damage type.
• In another run, I developed my adventurer around reward boxes and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters each time I claimed a reward.

The build options are not endless, but there's enough to engage with to allow you to tweak the odds to your preference.

A Persistent Tension

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have a likely outcome to hit the square you want but wind up hitting a monster that would deplete your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and determine if to press onward or when to move on to the subsequent stage rather than testing fate.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs help cut down the chance, as do some character abilities. One hero's special power, activated once clearing four squares, enables you to select a vertical column in place of a row on a turn. By employing this move wisely, you can save that move for the right moment to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking degree of depth in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is currently in early access, and it has a final update scheduled until the full version is released. A new character and a fresh guardian are planned for release before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be long after, but the creators haven't set a final date yet.

A Final Thought

Regardless of when its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of little secrets and banking my earned gold in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of permanent unlocks, such as new characters and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I'll continue working on that task when the full version launches. I'm committed for the long haul.