🔗 Share this article

Following my time with more than 200 recent games this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is published, and I feel content with the final results, despite being aware a host of fantastic releases likely fell by the wayside. Currently, my only nothing for me to do other than unwind, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, found another amazing experience. And just like that, goodbye to my intentions!

A Premature Contender Emerges

During my 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 significant risk danger and payoff. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you enjoy discovering a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your gaming budget.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

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, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. In practice, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer who has parameters and powers, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, acquire some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp!

The Novel Central System

The method by which you actually clear a area, however. Each instance you enter a new floor, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. All spaces features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you end up on is determined by luck.

You may face a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of selecting any given square in a row.

Then, you'll probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you click on a safer line first and attempt some less risky choices early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get a feel for it.

Shaping the Odds

The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by picking up teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. For example, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about manipulating math to the utmost to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I focused my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth I could that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I constructed my hero around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I opened a chest.

The build options are somewhat constrained, but it provides ample to engage with to let you manipulate probabilities according to your strategy.

A Constant Tension

Of course, it's still a game of chance. There remains the possibility that you have a likely outcome to select the desired tile but wind up hitting on an enemy that would deplete your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you clear a floor out and determine if to press onward or when to move on to the next floor rather than pushing your luck.

Consumables including enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, similar to some hero powers. An adventurer's signature move, activated once selecting four tiles, enables you to choose a vertical column instead of a horizontal line during that action. If you play your cards right, you can save that move for a crucial point to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has a final update scheduled until the complete edition is launched. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The official version likely won't be far behind, but the creators haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Thought

No matter when the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been completely engrossed with it, discovering its small details and banking my earned gold per attempt to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, including new characters and items available for acquisition while playing. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I suspect I'll still be pursuing that objective when the official release drops. Sign me up for the entire experience.