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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, accepting that numerous stellar titles may have dropped under the radar. Now, there's plan is to but sit back, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, discovered one more great game. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

In my more casual gaming time, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of major consequence risk and reward. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I've previously experienced. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has gone missing from its world. Mechanically, this creates some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer with their own attributes and skills, fight through each level of monsters, acquire some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Unique Gameplay Loop

How you effectively complete a area, is unique. Each instance you start another stage, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To make a move, you choose on one of the four rows, but which square you end up on is a matter of probability.

You could encounter a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of landing on a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your chances are recalculated. So do you go for it, or do you click on a different row first and attempt some less risky choices early? Herein lies the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating when you acquire its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped during an attempt by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a higher chance at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I invested my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and picked as many teeth I could that would increase my odds of being drawn to monsters aligned with that strength.
• On a different attempt, I built my character around treasure chests and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I secured loot.

The build options are not endless, but it provides ample to engage with to allow you to tweak numbers to your preference.

An Ever-Present Risk

Of course, it's still a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have an 80% chance to land on the square you want but end up landing on an enemy that would eliminate your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and choose whether to press onward or when to move on to the subsequent stage instead of pushing your luck.

Items like enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, similar to some hero powers. An adventurer's unique ability, activated once selecting four tiles, allows players to select a column instead of a horizontal row for that move. Should you use your cards right, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. You'll find an astonishing amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is remaining in early access, and it has another update planned before the final game is unleashed. A new character and a fresh guardian are planned for release before the conclusion of January. The official version probably isn't long after, but the game's developers haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Parting Recommendation

Whenever its 1.0 launch occurs, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, discovering its small details and storing my run rewards in each run to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, featuring new characters and items I can buy while playing. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I have a sense I will remain attempting that goal when the full version launches. Sign me up for the entire experience.