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Following my time with in excess of 200 recent games this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My year-end list is published, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, even knowing plenty of stellar titles probably slipped by the wayside. At this point, it's plan is to except relax, take a short break, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— oh no, stumbled upon a brilliant title. So much for my plans!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

With my casual gaming time, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've come across potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of high stakes peril and prize. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy being aware of a game before it's cool, 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 concept is that you must venture into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. In practice, this creates some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero with their own stats and abilities, fight through each level of monsters, acquire some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

The method by which you effectively complete a chamber, though. Whenever you enter a new floor, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. All spaces features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To make a move, you choose on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you land in is a matter of probability.

You may face a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of selecting a particular space in a row.

After that, the odds shift. So do you press your luck, or do you click on a different row first and try to make less risky choices early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating after you develop a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced during an attempt by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're more attracted to. For example, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• On a particular session, I put all my power boosts toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters with that damage type.
• In another run, I constructed my hero around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I secured loot.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but it provides ample to engage with to allow you to tweak the odds to your preference.

A Persistent Gamble

Naturally, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have an 80% chance to select the square you want but end up landing a foe that would eliminate your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you clear a floor out and choose whether to keep clicking or when to move on to the subsequent stage rather than pushing your luck.

Items like destructive ordnance aid in reducing the chance, as do some character abilities. One hero's special power, powered up by clearing four squares, lets gamers to click on a vertical line instead of a horizontal line during that action. If you play your cards right, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in development, and it has a final update scheduled until the final game is released. Another playable adventurer and a new boss are expected to drop by the end of January. The official version likely won't be far behind, but the creators haven't set a specific release window yet.

A Final Thought

No matter when it's fully released, you should consider put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been thoroughly captivated with it, uncovering each of small details and saving my accumulated currency every session to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, such as new characters and items available for acquisition while playing. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I'll continue pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Sign me up for the long haul.