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Following my time with well over 200 recent games this year, I am officially wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is published, and I feel content with the final results, even knowing plenty of excellent games likely fell under the radar. At this point, it's job is to other than unwind, unplug a little, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, discovered one more great game. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

During my laid-back sessions, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of major consequence risk and reward. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I've ever played. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has vanished from its world. In practice, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero possessing unique attributes and skills, fight through each level of enemies, collect some passive buffs (which are teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

The way you truly navigate a area, though. Every time you start another stage, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To proceed, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you land in is up to chance.

You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of landing on a particular space in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you click on a different row first and try to make safer moves early? That's the risk-reward dynamic in action in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating once you get its rhythm.

Manipulating Probability

The procedural hook is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by gathering teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will reduce the probability of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a higher chance at getting your desired outcome.
• On a particular session, I focused my power boosts toward brute force and picked as many teeth possible that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters each time I secured loot.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to experiment with to enable you to influence numbers to your preference.

A Constant Gamble

Of course, it remains a game of chance. There's always the chance that you have a high probability to land on the desired tile but wind up hitting a foe that would take out your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and choose whether to continue selecting or to proceed to the next floor as opposed to pushing your luck.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, just like some character abilities. An adventurer's signature move, charged after clearing four squares, enables you to click on a vertical column in place of a horizontal row for that move. By employing your cards right, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has another update planned before the complete edition is released. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are planned for release sometime in January. The 1.0 release may not be long after, but the creators haven't announced a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Recommendation

Regardless of when its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of small details and saving my accumulated currency every session to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, featuring new characters and items purchasable mid-attempt. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I'll still be pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the long haul.