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Following my time with well over 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I feel content with the final results, even knowing a host of stellar titles may have dropped by the wayside. Currently, my only job is to other than unwind, take a short break, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, stumbled upon a great game. So much for my intentions!

An Early Front-Runner Appears

In my more off-hours play, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've encountered what might become my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of significant risk peril and prize. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy in knowing about a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The concept is that you must venture into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. In practice, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Select a character who has parameters and powers, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, pick up some permanent upgrades (represented as teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Easy to grasp!

The Unique Core Mechanic

How you truly navigate a dungeon room, however. Whenever you enter a new floor, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To make a move, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you select is up to chance.

You may face a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of hitting any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you opt on a alternative option first and try to make more cautious selections early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating once you get a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by picking up teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. For example, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a reward too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• During one attempt, I invested my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and chose every teeth possible that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I secured loot.

The build options are not endless, but they are sufficient to experiment with to allow you to tweak numbers according to your strategy.

A Constant Gamble

Unsurprisingly, it remains a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have a high probability to hit the square you want but wind up hitting a monster 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 following level as opposed to risking it all.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, as do some hero powers. An adventurer's signature move, activated once making four moves, lets gamers to select a vertical line rather than a horizontal row on a turn. If you play your cards right, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising level of strategy in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in its preview phase, and it has at least one more update to go before the full version is unleashed. An additional hero and a additional end-level foe are planned for release by the end of January. The 1.0 release probably isn't far behind, but the studio haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Thought

No matter when the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its hidden nuances and banking my earned gold every session to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, featuring fresh adventurers and items purchasable mid-attempt. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I will remain attempting that goal when the full version launches. Count me in for the entire experience.