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Having experienced in excess of 200 new releases this year, I am officially wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, accepting that a host of stellar titles probably slipped through the cracks. Now, there's plan is to but sit back, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— ah crap, discovered one more amazing experience. So much for my plans!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

During my laid-back sessions, typically earmarked for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered what might become my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of major consequence peril and prize. Consider this a preview for the in-the-know: If you relish being aware of a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I've ever played. The concept is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. Mechanically, this creates some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero possessing unique stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of enemies, collect some permanent upgrades (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

The method by which you actually clear a chamber, is unique. Whenever you enter a new floor, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you choose on one of the four rows, but the exact space you end up on is up to chance.

You might see a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a 25% chance of selecting any given square in a row.

Then, you'll chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you choose on a safer line first and aim for more cautious selections early? That's the risk-reward dynamic in action in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop an understanding of it.

Shaping the Odds

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped during an attempt by picking up teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of getting a reward too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• On a particular session, I invested my attribute improvements toward brute force and chose every teeth I could that would increase my odds of landing on monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around treasure chests and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes whenever I secured loot.

The strategic possibilities are limited, but they are sufficient to work with to enable you to influence numbers to your preference.

A Persistent Tension

Naturally, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have an 80% chance to land on the preferred space but ultimately choose a monster that would deplete your remaining life. Every move is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you clear a floor out and determine if to press onward or when to move on to the subsequent stage as opposed to testing fate.

Consumables including destructive ordnance help cut down the chance, just like some character abilities. A particular character's special power, charged after selecting four tiles, enables you to click on a column rather than a row on a turn. Should you use your cards right, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. You'll find an astonishing degree of depth in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has another update planned until the complete edition is unleashed. A new character and a new boss are planned for release by the end of January. The 1.0 release probably isn't much later, but the game's developers haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

Whenever the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its hidden nuances and banking my earned gold in each run to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, including fresh adventurers and items I can buy mid-attempt. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll still be attempting that goal when the full version launches. Count me in for the entire experience.