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Following my time with in excess of 200 new releases this year, I am officially wrapping things up on 2025. My year-end list is live, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, accepting that plenty of fantastic releases probably slipped under the radar. Now, there's job is to other than unwind, unplug a little, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— oh no, found another amazing experience. So much for my intentions!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

With my casual gaming time, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of major consequence danger and payoff. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you relish being aware of a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I've ever played. The concept is that you need to explore a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. Mechanically, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero with their own parameters and powers, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, collect some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Unique Gameplay Loop

How you truly navigate a chamber, is unique. Each instance you start another stage, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you end up on is up to chance.

You might see a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a 25% chance of selecting a particular space in a row.

Then, you'll chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you click on a different row first and attempt some less risky choices early? Herein lies the push-your-luck gameplay on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop an understanding of it.

Shaping the Odds

The meta-layer is that your odds can be manipulated during an attempt by picking up 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 landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I put all my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and chose every teeth I could that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• On a different attempt, I built my character around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I opened a chest.

The build options are not endless, but they are sufficient to work with to let you manipulate the odds according to your strategy.

A Persistent Tension

Of course, it remains a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have a likely outcome to select the desired tile but ultimately choose a monster that would deplete your final hit point. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and choose whether to keep clicking or to advance to the next floor rather than risking it all.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs help cut down the chance, just like some hero powers. One hero's unique ability, charged after selecting four tiles, allows players to choose a column instead of a row on a turn. By employing your cards right, you can save that move for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising degree of depth in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has at least one more update to go before the final game is unleashed. Another playable adventurer and a additional end-level foe are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The 1.0 release probably isn't far behind, but the creators haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Endorsement

Whenever its 1.0 launch occurs, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been thoroughly captivated with it, finding all of little secrets and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, including fresh adventurers and items purchasable while playing. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I have a sense I'll still be working on that task when the official release drops. I'm committed for the long haul.