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Following my time with more than 200 recent games this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My year-end list is published, and I feel content with the final results, even knowing a host of excellent games may have dropped under the radar. Now, there's nothing for me to do but sit back, take a short break, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, discovered one more amazing experience. So much for my plans!

An Early Front-Runner Appears

In my more off-hours play, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, I've discovered what could be my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of major consequence risk and reward. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your gaming budget.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's unlike anything I've previously experienced. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from this mythical realm. In practice, this results in some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer possessing unique parameters and powers, fight through each level of enemies, pick up some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Unique Central System

The method by which you effectively complete a dungeon room, however. Each instance you enter a new floor, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To make a move, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you end up on is a matter of probability.

You could encounter a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a quarter likelihood of selecting a specific tile in a row.

After that, the odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you choose on a different row first and aim for less risky choices early? This is the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing when you acquire its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by gathering teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will reduce the probability of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math as best you can to have a better shot at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I focused my stat upgrades toward brute force and chose every teeth I could that would improve my probability of being drawn to monsters with that damage type.
• In another run, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I claimed a reward.

The strategic possibilities are limited, but they are sufficient to engage with to allow you to tweak numbers to your preference.

A Persistent Tension

Of course, it remains a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have a likely outcome to select the preferred space but ultimately choose on an enemy that would deplete 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 continue selecting or to advance to the next floor as opposed to pushing your luck.

Tools such as destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, as do some special skills. One hero's unique ability, charged after making four moves, enables you to select a vertical line rather than a horizontal line on a turn. Should you use your cards right, you can save that move for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking degree of depth in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is currently in its preview phase, and it has another update scheduled until the full version is released. A new character and a additional end-level foe are planned for release by the end of January. The official version probably isn't long after, but the studio haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Thought

No matter when the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been thoroughly captivated with it, finding all of hidden nuances and banking my earned gold in each run to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, such as additional heroes and items purchasable during a run. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I suspect I will remain attempting that goal when the official release drops. Sign me up for the complete journey.