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Having experienced well over 200 fresh titles this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I am at peace with the final results, accepting that plenty of stellar titles probably slipped by the wayside. Now, there's job is to except relax, take a short break, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, found another amazing experience. So much for my intentions!

A Premature Contender Emerges

In my more casual gaming time, typically earmarked for a selection of unusual games, I've encountered what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of high stakes risk and reward. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I've ever played. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. When you play, this creates some familiar roguelike structure. Choose an adventurer who has attributes and skills, fight through each level of foes, pick up some permanent upgrades (represented as teeth), and overcome a few area guardians. Easy to grasp!

The Unique Gameplay Loop

How you effectively complete a chamber, though. Each instance you enter a new floor, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you land in is up to chance.

You may face a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of selecting a specific tile in a row.

Then, you'll chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you opt on a alternative option first and try to make more cautious selections early? That's the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The procedural hook is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by gathering teeth that alter which objects you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will lower your chances of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a better shot at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I put all my stat upgrades toward brute force and picked as many teeth possible that would improve my probability of landing on monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I claimed a reward.

The build options are not endless, but it provides ample to work with to allow you to tweak the odds to your preference.

A Constant Gamble

Of course, it's still a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have an 80% chance to select the desired tile but wind up hitting on an enemy that would deplete your final hit point. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and choose whether to keep clicking or to proceed to the subsequent stage rather than risking it all.

Items like enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some special skills. An adventurer's special power, activated once selecting four tiles, enables you to select a column instead of a row for that move. By employing your cards right, you can save that move for the right moment to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising degree of depth in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has a final update to go before the complete edition is launched. Another playable adventurer and a new boss are planned for release by the end of January. The official version probably isn't long after, but the creators haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Thought

Whenever the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been thoroughly captivated with it, finding all of hidden nuances and storing my run rewards in each run to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, featuring additional heroes and items available for acquisition while playing. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I suspect I'll still be pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Sign me up for the long haul.