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Following my time with well over 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I feel content with the concluding selections, accepting that numerous fantastic releases likely fell under the radar. Currently, my only job is to but sit back, unplug a little, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— ah crap, discovered one more brilliant title. And just like that, goodbye to my intentions!

A Surprising Front-Runner Appears

With my laid-back sessions, typically earmarked for a handful of quirky titles, I've discovered what might become 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 luck-based game of major consequence peril and prize. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride discovering a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Strategic Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I've ever played. The setup is that you must venture into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. In practice, that makes for some familiar roguelike structure. Pick a hero who has stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, pick up some stat improvements (which are teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Unique Central System

The method by which you effectively complete a dungeon room, is unique. Whenever you begin a fresh level, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To make a move, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you land in is up to chance.

You might see a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a quarter likelihood of hitting a particular space in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. So do you press your luck, or do you opt on a safer line first and attempt some less risky choices early? This is the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating after you develop its rhythm.

Manipulating Probability

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by picking up teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• On a particular session, I invested my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• In another run, I built my character around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I claimed a reward.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but it provides ample to experiment with to allow you to tweak the odds the way you want.

A Constant Tension

Of course, it's still a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have a likely outcome to select the preferred space but ultimately choose a foe that would eliminate your remaining life. Every move is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you work through a stage and decide when to continue selecting or when to move on to the following level rather than testing fate.

Tools such as destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, as do some special skills. An adventurer's signature move, activated once making four moves, lets gamers to choose a vertical column instead of a horizontal row for that move. Should you use your cards right, you can save that move for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has at least one more update scheduled before the full version is released. A new character and a fresh guardian are planned for release before the conclusion of January. The official version likely won't be long after, but the studio haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you should consider put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of little secrets and banking my earned gold every session to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, including fresh adventurers and items available for acquisition during a run. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I have a sense I'll continue working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the long haul.