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Having experienced in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I feel content with the concluding selections, even knowing a host of fantastic releases probably slipped through the cracks. Now, there's nothing for me to do except relax, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, found another great game. And just like that, goodbye to my plans!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

During my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a handful of quirky titles, I've encountered potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a classic labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of major consequence risk and reward. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you relish in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I'm familiar with. The premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. When you play, this creates some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer with their own stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, acquire some permanent upgrades (which are teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Simple enough!

The Unique Gameplay Loop

The way you truly navigate a dungeon room, is unique. Each instance you start another stage, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you just select on one of the four rows, but which square you select is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a 25% chance of selecting any given square in a row.

Then, you'll chances are recalculated. So do you take the risk, or do you click on a different row first and aim for less risky choices early? That's the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating after you develop its rhythm.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced during an attempt by picking up teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. As an instance, you might get a perk that will reduce the probability of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a reward too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math to the utmost to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• On a particular session, I put all my attribute improvements toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth possible that would improve my probability of landing on monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I constructed my hero around treasure chests and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes every time I claimed a reward.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but they are sufficient to work with to let you manipulate the odds according to your strategy.

A Persistent Risk

Naturally, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have a likely outcome to hit the square you want but end up landing a foe that would deplete your final hit point. Every move is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you work through a stage and decide when to continue selecting or to advance to the next floor instead of risking it all.

Items like enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, just like some special skills. An adventurer's special power, powered up by clearing four squares, enables you to click on a vertical line rather than a horizontal row for that move. If you play this strategically, you can hold that ability for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising level of strategy in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in development, and it has a final update scheduled before the complete edition is unleashed. A new character and a new boss are planned for release sometime in January. The full launch probably isn't much later, but the creators haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Final Thought

Whenever it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been completely engrossed with it, discovering its hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to access a constant flow of permanent unlocks, such as new characters and items purchasable during a run. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll continue working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the long haul.