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Having experienced more than 200 new releases this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I am at peace with the final results, even knowing plenty of stellar titles likely fell by the wayside. Now, there's nothing for me to do except relax, take a short break, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— oh no, found another brilliant title. So much for my peaceful respite!

An Early Contender Emerges

During my off-hours play, usually reserved for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across what could be my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a classic dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of major consequence danger and payoff. Consider this an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's different from everything I've previously experienced. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. In practice, this creates some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer possessing unique attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, pick up some stat improvements (which are teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Easy to grasp!

The Unique Central System

The way you truly navigate a chamber, however. Whenever you enter a new floor, you're shown a four-by-four matrix 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 four rows, but which square you select is determined by luck.

You may face a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a 25% chance of hitting a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you opt on a safer line first and aim for more cautious selections early? Herein lies the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating when you acquire its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The meta-layer is that your odds can be manipulated through a run by picking up teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. For example, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a reward too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math to the utmost to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• In one run, I put all my attribute improvements toward melee prowess and picked as many teeth I could that would increase my odds of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• In another run, I built my character around reward boxes and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I secured loot.

The build options are not endless, but it provides ample to work with to let you manipulate probabilities the way you want.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Naturally, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the chance that you have a likely outcome to select the preferred space but wind up hitting a foe that would take out your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and choose whether to keep clicking or when to move on to the subsequent stage as opposed to risking it all.

Consumables including enemy-killing bombs help cut down the chance, similar to some special skills. An adventurer's signature move, activated once selecting four tiles, enables you to choose a vertical column rather than a horizontal row during that action. If you play this strategically, you can reserve that option for the right moment to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising degree of depth in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is remaining in early access, and it has a final update planned before the complete edition is unleashed. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are planned for release before the conclusion of January. The full launch may not be long after, but the game's developers haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you should consider put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency every session to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, such as additional heroes and items available for acquisition while playing. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I'll continue pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the long haul.