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Having experienced in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I am officially wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I feel content with the concluding selections, accepting that a host of excellent games probably slipped under the radar. Now, there's nothing for me to do except relax, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— well, shoot, found another amazing experience. There go my peaceful respite!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

During my casual gaming time, typically earmarked for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of major consequence peril and prize. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride being aware of a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The premise is that you must venture into a dungeon, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has gone missing from its world. When you play, this creates some familiar roguelike structure. Choose an adventurer with their own stats and abilities, fight through each level of monsters, collect some permanent upgrades (represented as teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Novel Central System

The way you actually clear a chamber, however. Whenever you begin a fresh level, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you land in is determined by luck.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a one-in-four probability of selecting a particular space in a row.

After that, the odds shift. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you click on a safer line first and aim for safer moves early? That's the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating after you develop its rhythm.

Influencing Chance

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of hitting a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I invested my power boosts toward melee prowess and chose every teeth possible that would boost my chances of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• In another run, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would debuff nearby foes every time I secured loot.

The build options are limited, but it provides ample to engage with to allow you to tweak numbers the way you want.

An Ever-Present Tension

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the possibility that you have an 80% chance to select the desired tile but end up landing on an enemy that would eliminate your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and choose whether to keep clicking or to proceed to the following level as opposed to pushing your luck.

Consumables including explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, as do some hero powers. One hero's unique ability, charged after selecting four tiles, enables you to click on a vertical line rather than a horizontal row on a turn. If you play this strategically, you can save that move for the right moment to circumvent a perilous selection. You'll find an astonishing amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is currently in early access, and it has at least one more update scheduled before the full version is released. An additional hero and a additional end-level foe are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The full launch likely won't be much later, but the game's developers haven't announced a concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Thought

No matter when it's fully released, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been thoroughly captivated with it, uncovering each of little secrets and storing my run rewards every session to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, including additional heroes and items available for acquisition during a run. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll continue attempting that goal when the official release drops. Sign me up for the complete journey.