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After playing in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to turning the page on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the final results, despite being aware plenty of excellent games may have dropped under the radar. Currently, my only plan is to except relax, unplug a little, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— ah crap, discovered one more brilliant title. So much for my intentions!

An Early Front-Runner Appears

In my more off-hours play, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across potentially my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a classic labyrinth explorer into a probability-fueled game of major consequence peril and prize. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, sample Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Tactical Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's unlike anything I've previously experienced. The premise is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. When you play, this creates some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero with their own parameters and powers, clear floor after floor of foes, acquire some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few area guardians. Straightforward, right!

The Unique Gameplay Loop

The way you effectively complete a dungeon room, however. Whenever you start another stage, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To make a move, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you select is determined by luck.

You could encounter a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of selecting a particular space in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you click on a different row first and aim for less risky choices early? This is the push-your-luck gameplay in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get a feel for it.

Shaping the Odds

The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by collecting teeth that alter which objects you're more attracted to. As an instance, you could acquire a perk that will lower your chances of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a reward too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I invested my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth possible that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes whenever I secured loot.

The build options are somewhat constrained, but it provides ample to engage with to let you manipulate probabilities according to your strategy.

A Constant Risk

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have a high probability to select the desired tile but end up landing a monster that would eliminate your final hit point. Every move is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you navigate a level and choose whether to continue selecting or to advance to the next floor as opposed to testing fate.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, as do some character abilities. One hero's special power, activated once selecting four tiles, enables you to click on a column in place of a row for that move. Should you use this move wisely, you can hold that ability for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking degree of depth in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has another update to go before the full version is unleashed. An additional hero and a new boss are planned for release sometime in January. The 1.0 release likely won't be long after, but the game's developers haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Parting 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 completely engrossed with it, discovering its hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, including fresh adventurers and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I suspect I'll still be working on that task when the official release drops. I'm committed for the entire experience.