🔗 Share this article

After playing more than 200 recent games this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, accepting that plenty of fantastic releases may have dropped under the radar. Currently, my only job is to except relax, take a short break, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— ah crap, found another brilliant title. So much for my intentions!

A Premature Contender Emerges

With my laid-back sessions, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what could be my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of significant risk danger and payoff. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I've ever played. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has disappeared from this mythical realm. In practice, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer possessing unique attributes and skills, clear floor after floor of foes, pick up some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and overcome a few area guardians. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Core Mechanic

The way you actually clear a dungeon room, is unique. Every time you begin a fresh level, the game presents a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces holds a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but which square 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 quarter likelihood of landing on a specific tile in a row.

After that, the chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you choose on a alternative option first and aim for more cautious selections early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing when you acquire an understanding of it.

Manipulating Probability

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated through a run by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a improved likelihood at landing where you want.
• In one run, I invested my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters aligned with that strength.
• In another run, I built my character around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I secured loot.

The strategic possibilities are limited, but it provides ample to engage with to allow you to tweak probabilities according to your strategy.

A Persistent Tension

Of course, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the chance that you have a likely outcome to land on the square you want but wind up hitting a monster that would take out your last bit of health. Every move is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you work through a stage and determine if to press onward or to proceed to the following level instead of pushing your luck.

Consumables including explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some hero powers. A particular character's signature move, charged after clearing four squares, lets gamers to choose a column rather than a row for that move. Should you use your cards right, you can reserve that option for the right moment to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has a final update to go until the full version is released. A new character and a fresh guardian are expected to drop sometime in January. The full launch probably isn't long after, but the studio haven't set a final date yet.

A Final Thought

No matter when the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of hidden nuances and banking my earned gold in each run to unlock a steady stream of permanent unlocks, such as additional heroes and items purchasable during a run. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll still be working on that task when the official release drops. Count me in for the long haul.