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After playing more than 200 new releases this year, It's time to turning the page on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I feel content with the final results, accepting that numerous excellent games likely fell through the cracks. Now, there's plan is to but sit back, unplug a little, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, stumbled upon a brilliant title. So much for my peaceful respite!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

With my off-hours play, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've come across potentially my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of high stakes peril and prize. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you relish in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, sample Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has gone missing from its world. When you play, this creates some standard crawl progression. Select a character with their own attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, acquire some permanent upgrades (which are teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Easy to grasp!

The Unique Core Mechanic

The way you effectively complete a area, though. Every time you enter a new floor, you see a four-by-four matrix of boxes. All spaces 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 the specific tile you select is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of hitting a particular space in a row.

After that, the odds shift. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you choose on a alternative option first and try to make less risky choices early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire its rhythm.

Manipulating Probability

The meta-layer is that your odds can be manipulated during an attempt by collecting teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a improved likelihood at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I invested my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth I could that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters aligned with that strength.
• In another run, I built my character around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes every time I secured loot.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but they are sufficient to experiment with to enable you to influence numbers the way you want.

A Constant Gamble

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have an 80% chance to land on the square you want but wind up hitting on an enemy that would eliminate 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 proceed to the next floor as opposed to testing fate.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs help cut down the chance, similar to some hero powers. An adventurer's signature move, charged after clearing four squares, allows players to select a column rather than a row on a turn. By employing this move wisely, you can save that move for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. You'll find an astonishing level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is remaining in its preview phase, and it has another update scheduled until the complete edition is released. An additional hero and a new boss are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be far behind, but the creators haven't announced a final date yet.

A Final Recommendation

Whenever the complete game arrives, you should consider put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been thoroughly captivated with it, finding all of small details and banking my earned gold in each run to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, including additional heroes and items I can buy while playing. I still haven't reached the bottom, and I have a sense I'll still be attempting that goal when the full version launches. Sign me up for the long haul.