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After playing well over 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is published, and I am at peace with the ultimate rankings, accepting that plenty of stellar titles likely fell under the radar. At this point, it's plan is to except relax, take a short break, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, discovered one more amazing experience. So much for my plans!

A Surprising Front-Runner Appears

During my casual gaming time, typically earmarked for a handful of quirky titles, I've encountered what might become my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a conventional labyrinth explorer into a probability-fueled game of significant risk peril and prize. Consider this a preview for the in-the-know: If you relish in knowing about a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's different from everything I've ever played. The concept is that you must venture into a dungeon, descending floor after floor to find the sun, which has disappeared from its world. In practice, this creates some familiar roguelike structure. Pick a hero possessing unique attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, acquire some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp!

The Unique Core Mechanic

How you effectively complete a dungeon room, though. Whenever you begin a fresh level, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. All spaces features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you select is determined by luck.

You might see a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of selecting a particular space in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you opt on a safer line first and attempt some less risky choices early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The meta-layer is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're more likely to land on. As an instance, you may obtain a perk that will lower your chances of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a better shot at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I put all my attribute improvements toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would increase my odds of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around treasure chests and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I claimed a reward.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to experiment with to allow you to tweak the odds the way you want.

A Constant Tension

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have an 80% chance to select the desired tile but ultimately choose a monster that would take out your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you clear a floor out and choose whether to keep clicking or to advance to the following level rather than pushing your luck.

Items like explosive devices help cut down the chance, similar to some character abilities. An adventurer's signature move, powered up by clearing four squares, enables you to choose a vertical column rather than a row during that action. Should you use your cards right, you can hold that ability for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has a final update scheduled until the full version is unleashed. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The full launch probably isn't much later, but the game's developers haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Parting Endorsement

Whenever its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I have been completely engrossed with it, uncovering each of small details and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, featuring fresh adventurers and items purchasable mid-attempt. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I'll continue attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the complete journey.