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Having experienced in excess of 200 recent games this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I feel content with the concluding selections, even knowing numerous excellent games may have dropped under the radar. Currently, my only job is to except relax, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— ah crap, discovered one more brilliant title. There go my intentions!

A Premature Contender Emerges

In my more off-hours play, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of high stakes danger and payoff. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you enjoy being aware of a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's unlike anything I'm familiar with. The premise is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has gone missing from this mythical realm. Mechanically, that makes for some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer with their own stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of enemies, acquire some permanent upgrades (which are teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Easy to grasp!

The Distinctive Core Mechanic

The method by which you truly navigate a chamber, is unique. Whenever you enter a new floor, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. All spaces features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To explore a room, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you land in is determined by luck.

You might see a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of landing on a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your chances are recalculated. So do you press your luck, or do you opt on a different row first and attempt some more cautious selections early? This is the push-your-luck gameplay in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get its rhythm.

Manipulating Probability

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped during an attempt by collecting teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. For example, you might get a perk that will reduce the probability of encountering a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about manipulating math optimally to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• On a particular session, I focused my attribute improvements toward melee prowess and picked as many teeth possible that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• On a different attempt, I constructed my hero around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I opened a chest.

The build options are not endless, but it provides ample to engage with to allow you to tweak numbers to your preference.

An Ever-Present Risk

Of course, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have a likely outcome to land on the preferred space but ultimately choose a monster that would take out your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you work through a stage and determine if to keep clicking or to proceed to the next floor instead of risking it all.

Items like explosive devices help cut down the chance, just like some character abilities. An adventurer's unique ability, charged after making four moves, lets gamers to choose a column in place of a row for that move. Should you use your cards right, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in early access, and it has another update to go before the final game is released. An additional hero and a additional end-level foe are planned for release before the conclusion of January. The official version likely won't be far behind, but the game's developers haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Endorsement

Regardless of when its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of small details and saving my accumulated currency in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, such as additional heroes and items purchasable during a run. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I suspect I will remain working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the entire experience.