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After playing in excess of 200 recent games this year, I'm formally closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I am at peace with the final results, accepting that plenty of excellent games probably slipped through the cracks. Now, there's job is to except relax, take a short break, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a amazing experience. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

An Early Contender Emerges

With my off-hours play, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a conventional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of major consequence risk and reward. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish being aware of a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. Mechanically, this creates some familiar roguelike structure. Select a character who has parameters and powers, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, acquire some permanent upgrades (which are teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Easy to grasp!

The Unique Core Mechanic

The way you truly navigate a area, however. Every time you enter a new floor, you see a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you select is a matter of probability.

You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a 25% chance of hitting any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you choose on a alternative option first and aim for more cautious selections early? That's the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The procedural hook is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by picking up teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. For example, you may obtain a perk that will reduce the probability of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• In one run, I invested my power boosts toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• In another run, I built my character around treasure chests and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I secured loot.

The build options are limited, but they are sufficient to engage with to allow you to tweak probabilities the way you want.

A Constant Gamble

Naturally, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have a high probability to hit the desired tile but end up landing on an enemy that would take out your final hit point. Every move is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and choose whether to continue selecting or to proceed to the subsequent stage rather than testing fate.

Items like destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, just like some hero powers. A particular character's signature move, powered up by clearing four squares, allows players to select a vertical column in place of a horizontal row for that move. By employing this move wisely, you can save that move for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has a final update to go until the complete edition is released. A new character and a fresh guardian are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be long after, but the studio haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Parting Recommendation

Regardless of when it's fully released, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I have been completely engrossed with it, finding all of small details and storing my run rewards in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, including fresh adventurers and items I can buy mid-attempt. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I suspect I will remain attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the long haul.