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Following my time with in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, even knowing numerous excellent games probably slipped through the cracks. Currently, my only nothing for me to do except relax, take a short break, and perhaps take a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a great game. There go my plans!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

During my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a handful of quirky titles, I've discovered what might become my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of significant risk risk and reward. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you relish in knowing about a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your gaming budget.

A Tactical Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, going down level by level in search of the sun, which has vanished from its world. When you play, that makes for some familiar roguelike structure. Pick a hero with their own attributes and skills, clear floor after floor of monsters, acquire some permanent upgrades (represented as teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp!

The Novel Core Mechanic

The way you actually clear a chamber, though. Every time you enter a new floor, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile holds a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To proceed, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you select is up to chance.

You may face a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a 25% chance of selecting a specific tile in a row.

Then, you'll chances are recalculated. So do you press your luck, or do you click on a alternative option first and attempt some less risky choices early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic on display in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating when you acquire its rhythm.

Influencing Chance

The meta-layer is that your odds can be manipulated through a run by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a reward too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I put all my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth possible that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I constructed my hero around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I secured loot.

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

An Ever-Present Tension

Naturally, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have an 80% chance to select the square you want but wind up hitting on an enemy that would eliminate your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you clear a floor out and determine if to continue selecting or to proceed to the subsequent stage rather than risking it all.

Items like explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, similar to some hero powers. One hero's unique ability, activated once making four moves, allows players to click on a vertical line in place of a horizontal row for that move. Should you use your cards right, you can hold that ability for the right moment to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is remaining in early access, and it has another update to go before the full version is unleashed. Another playable adventurer and a new boss are expected to drop sometime in January. The full launch may not be far behind, but the studio haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Parting Thought

Regardless of when its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been positively obsessed with it, discovering its hidden nuances and storing my run rewards in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of permanent unlocks, such as new characters and items purchasable while playing. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I have a sense I'll still be pursuing that objective when the full version launches. I'm committed for the entire experience.