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After playing well over 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, even knowing a host of excellent games likely fell by the wayside. Now, there's plan is to except relax, disconnect briefly, and maybe enjoy a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, found another great game. And just like that, goodbye to my plans!

A Premature Front-Runner Appears

With my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of high stakes risk and reward. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride discovering a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I've ever played. The concept is that you must venture into a dungeon, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. Mechanically, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Select a character possessing unique parameters and powers, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, acquire some permanent upgrades (represented as teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Easy to grasp!

The Novel Core Mechanic

The way you truly navigate a chamber, is unique. Every time you start another stage, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces either contains a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the exact space you select is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a one-in-four probability of selecting a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. So do you take the risk, or do you choose on a safer line first and attempt some more cautious selections early? This is the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating once you get an understanding of it.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your odds can be manipulated through a run by gathering teeth that alter which objects you're drawn toward. As an instance, you may obtain a perk that will reduce the probability of encountering a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers to the utmost to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I focused my attribute improvements toward melee prowess and picked as many teeth possible that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters aligned with that strength.
• In another run, I built my character around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I opened a chest.

The build options are not endless, but they are sufficient to work with to let you manipulate probabilities to your preference.

A Persistent Tension

Unsurprisingly, it remains a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have an 80% chance to land on the square you want but ultimately choose on an enemy that would deplete your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you clear a floor out and determine if to keep clicking or when to move on to the following level instead of pushing your luck.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, just like some hero powers. One hero's special power, powered up by selecting four tiles, enables you to select a vertical column instead of a horizontal row on a turn. By employing this strategically, you can save that move for an optimal time to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has another update to go before the final game is released. A new character and a fresh guardian are expected to drop before the conclusion of January. The full launch likely won't be far behind, but the studio haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Thought

Whenever it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been completely engrossed with it, uncovering each of small details and storing my run rewards in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of permanent unlocks, featuring additional heroes and items purchasable while playing. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I have a sense I'll continue working on that task when the official release drops. Sign me up for the complete journey.