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Having experienced in excess of 200 new releases this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I am at peace with the final results, even knowing plenty of excellent games likely fell through the cracks. Now, there's job is to but sit back, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— oh no, discovered one more brilliant title. There go my intentions!

A Premature Front-Runner Appears

With my off-hours play, typically earmarked for a few oddball curiosities, I've discovered what might become my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of significant risk danger and payoff. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you relish in knowing about a game before it's popular, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your gaming budget.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I've ever played. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from its world. Mechanically, this creates some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer with their own parameters and powers, fight through each level of foes, pick up some passive buffs (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Central System

How you actually clear a area, though. Each instance you start another stage, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you just select on one of the four rows, 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 begin with a 25% chance of landing on any given square in a row.

Then, you'll probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you choose on a different row first and attempt some safer moves early? This is the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop an understanding of it.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by gathering teeth that change what things you're more attracted to. As an instance, you may obtain a perk that will reduce the probability of hitting a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a better shot at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I put all my power boosts toward brute force and picked as many teeth possible that would increase my odds of being drawn to monsters aligned with that strength.
• In another run, I constructed my hero around treasure chests and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I claimed a reward.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to engage with to enable you to influence numbers the way you want.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Naturally, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the risk that you have an 80% chance to hit the square you want but end up landing a monster that would take out your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and determine if to continue selecting or when to move on to the next floor instead of pushing your luck.

Items like explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, just like some special skills. A particular character's signature move, activated once making four moves, allows players to click on a column in place of a horizontal row on a turn. By employing this move wisely, you can save that move for the right moment to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has at least one more update scheduled before the final game is released. A new character and a new boss are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The 1.0 release likely won't be long after, but the studio haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Thought

No matter when the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of small details and banking my earned gold in each run to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, such as fresh adventurers and items available for acquisition while playing. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I suspect I will remain pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the long haul.