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Following my time with more than 200 new releases this year, It's time to closing the book on 2025. My annual roundup is published, and I am at peace with the concluding selections, even knowing plenty of excellent games likely fell through the cracks. At this point, it's plan is to other than unwind, take a short break, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— oh no, stumbled upon a brilliant title. So much for my peaceful respite!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

With my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a classic labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of major consequence risk and reward. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you relish in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I'm familiar with. The premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has gone missing from this mythical realm. Mechanically, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Select a character with their own stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, acquire some passive buffs (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Unique Gameplay Loop

The method by which you effectively complete a chamber, is unique. Every time you start another stage, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square features a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. 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 multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a 25% chance of selecting any given square in a row.

Then, you'll odds shift. So do you take the risk, or do you opt on a different row first and attempt some safer moves early? That's the risk-reward dynamic in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

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 reduce the probability of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a better shot at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I put all my stat upgrades toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• On a different attempt, I developed my adventurer around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I claimed a reward.

The build options are not endless, but there's enough to experiment with to let you manipulate numbers to your preference.

An Ever-Present Tension

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have a likely outcome to land on the square you want but end up landing a monster that would deplete your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you navigate a level and choose whether to keep clicking or to advance to the following level instead of risking it all.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some special skills. An adventurer's signature move, activated once making four moves, lets gamers to click on a vertical column instead of a row on a turn. By employing your cards right, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has another update scheduled until the final game is launched. An additional hero and a additional end-level foe are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The official version probably isn't long after, but the game's developers haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Final Endorsement

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency in each run to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, including fresh adventurers and items available for acquisition during a run. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I suspect I'll still be attempting that goal when the official release drops. Sign me up for the entire experience.