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After playing well over 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally closing the book on 2025. My year-end list is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, despite being aware a host of stellar titles probably slipped through the cracks. Currently, my only job is to other than unwind, take a short break, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— ah crap, found another great game. So much for my peaceful respite!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

During my off-hours play, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, I've discovered what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a traditional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of high stakes risk and reward. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The premise is that you must venture into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. Mechanically, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero with their own stats and abilities, fight through each level of enemies, collect some permanent upgrades (represented as teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp!

The Unique Central System

How you actually clear a dungeon room, though. Whenever you enter a new floor, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you end up on is determined by luck.

You may face a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of hitting a specific tile in a row.

Then, you'll probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you opt on a safer line first and attempt some less risky choices early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating when you acquire its rhythm.

Manipulating Probability

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're more likely to land on. For example, you could acquire a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I put all my attribute improvements toward brute force and chose every teeth I could that would boost my chances of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• On a different attempt, I constructed my hero around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I secured loot.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to engage with to let you manipulate numbers to your preference.

An Ever-Present Tension

Of course, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have a likely outcome to land on the preferred space but ultimately choose on an enemy that would take out your final hit point. Every move is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and determine if to press onward or when to move on to the following level instead of risking it all.

Consumables including destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, just like some character abilities. One hero's signature move, charged after making four moves, enables you to select a vertical column instead of a row during that action. Should you use this move wisely, you can reserve that option for the right moment to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has at least one more update to go before the complete edition is unleashed. A new character and a fresh guardian are expected to drop by the end of January. The official version may not be long after, but the creators haven't announced a specific release window yet.

A Final Recommendation

Regardless of when its 1.0 launch occurs, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been thoroughly captivated with it, uncovering each of hidden nuances and storing my run rewards per attempt to unlock a steady stream of permanent unlocks, such as additional heroes and items purchasable during a run. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I'll continue working on that task when the full version launches. Count me in for the complete journey.