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After playing well over 200 recent games this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I feel content with the concluding selections, accepting that numerous stellar titles may have dropped by the wayside. Now, there's nothing for me to do other than unwind, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— well, shoot, found another amazing experience. And just like that, goodbye to my plans!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

With my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a handful of quirky titles, I've discovered potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a conventional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of major consequence peril and prize. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I've previously experienced. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor to find the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. In practice, this creates some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero who has attributes and skills, fight through each level of monsters, pick up some stat improvements (which are teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Easy to grasp!

The Distinctive Core Mechanic

The method by which you effectively complete a chamber, though. Every time you start another stage, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To proceed, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you end up on is a matter of probability.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a 25% chance of landing on a specific tile 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 safer moves early? This is the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating when you acquire a feel for it.

Manipulating Probability

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by picking up teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will reduce the probability of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about manipulating math optimally to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I invested my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth possible that would improve my probability of landing on monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, I built my character around reward boxes and coupled it with a perk that would debuff nearby foes whenever I opened a chest.

The build options are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to work with to let you manipulate probabilities the way you want.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Naturally, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have a high probability to select the preferred space but wind up hitting a foe that would deplete your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and decide when to keep clicking or when to move on to the following level instead of testing fate.

Consumables including explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, just like some special skills. A particular character's unique ability, powered up by selecting four tiles, lets gamers to choose a vertical line rather than a horizontal line for that move. By employing this move wisely, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has another update planned until the complete edition is launched. A new character and a new boss are planned for release sometime in January. The 1.0 release may not be far behind, but the studio haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

Regardless of when it's fully released, you should consider put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of small details and saving my accumulated currency every session to unlock a steady stream of permanent unlocks, such as fresh adventurers and items I can buy during a run. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I'll still be pursuing that objective when the official release drops. Count me in for the complete journey.