🔗 Share this article

After playing in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My year-end list is published, and I feel content with the concluding selections, accepting that plenty of excellent games likely fell through the cracks. Currently, my only job is to but sit back, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, stumbled upon a great game. And just like that, goodbye to my intentions!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

With my laid-back sessions, usually reserved for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of major consequence danger and payoff. 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 make a dent in your wallet for unique titles.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I'm familiar with. The premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor to find the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. Mechanically, this creates some recognizable genre framework. Select a character possessing unique stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, collect some stat improvements (which are teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Unique Core Mechanic

The way you truly navigate a area, though. Each instance you start another stage, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you end up on is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of selecting a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. So do you press your luck, or do you choose on a safer line first and attempt some less risky choices early? This is the risk-reward dynamic on display in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating after you develop a feel for it.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated during an attempt by collecting 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 hitting a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about manipulating math to the utmost to have a better shot at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I put all my power boosts toward brute force and picked as many teeth I could that would improve my probability of landing on monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I constructed my hero around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I opened a chest.

The customization choices are not endless, but there's enough to engage with to allow you to tweak numbers the way you want.

A Constant Gamble

Naturally, it's still a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have a likely outcome to hit the desired tile but wind up hitting on an enemy that would take out your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and determine if to keep clicking or when to move on to the next floor as opposed to testing fate.

Items like enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, just like some special skills. A particular character's unique ability, charged after clearing four squares, enables you to choose a vertical line instead of a horizontal row for that move. If you play your cards right, you can hold that ability for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking degree of depth in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has another update scheduled until the complete edition is released. Another playable adventurer and a new boss are planned for release by the end of January. The 1.0 release probably isn't far behind, but the game's developers haven't announced a final date yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

Whenever its 1.0 launch occurs, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been completely engrossed with it, uncovering each of small details and saving my accumulated currency every session to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, such as additional heroes and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I'll still be attempting that goal when the official release drops. Count me in for the long haul.