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Having experienced in excess of 200 recent games this year, I am officially wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I feel content with the final results, accepting that a host of excellent games may have dropped through the cracks. Currently, my only job is to other than unwind, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— oh no, found another great game. There go my plans!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

In my more laid-back sessions, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of major consequence danger and payoff. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride discovering a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I'm familiar with. The premise is that you must venture into a dungeon, going down level by level in search of the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. When you play, this creates some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero possessing unique attributes and skills, fight through each level of enemies, pick up some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Unique Gameplay Loop

How you truly navigate a chamber, however. Each instance you start another stage, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you land in is determined by luck.

You could encounter 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.

Then, you'll odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you click on a different row first and aim for safer moves early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic in action in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get an understanding of it.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped during an attempt by picking up teeth that change what things you're more attracted to. As an instance, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• During one attempt, I put all my power boosts toward melee prowess and chose every teeth possible that would improve my probability of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• In another run, I constructed my hero around treasure chests and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I opened a chest.

The build options are not endless, but there's enough to engage with to enable you to influence the odds to your preference.

An Ever-Present Risk

Naturally, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the chance that you have an 80% chance to land on the square you want but wind up hitting a monster that would eliminate your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and decide when to press onward or when to move on to the subsequent stage as opposed to pushing your luck.

Consumables including destructive ordnance aid in reducing the chance, just like some special skills. A particular character's signature move, activated once selecting four tiles, enables you to select a vertical column instead of a horizontal row during that action. Should you use this move wisely, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking degree of depth in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in its preview phase, and it has another update scheduled until the full version is launched. A new character and a new boss are planned for release before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release probably isn't long after, but the game's developers haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Recommendation

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, discovering its hidden nuances and storing my run rewards per attempt to access a constant flow of permanent unlocks, featuring additional heroes and items I can buy mid-attempt. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I'll continue attempting that goal when the official release drops. Sign me up for the complete journey.