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Having experienced in excess of 200 new releases this year, It's time to closing the book on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the ultimate rankings, even knowing plenty of stellar titles probably slipped by the wayside. Now, there's nothing for me to do except relax, unplug a little, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— oh no, stumbled upon a great game. There go my intentions!

An Early Contender Emerges

In my more laid-back sessions, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a classic labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of high stakes risk and reward. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's a departure from all I've ever played. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from its world. Mechanically, that makes for some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero who has attributes and skills, fight through each level of monsters, collect some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Unique Core Mechanic

How you truly navigate a dungeon room, though. Whenever you enter a new floor, you see a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you select is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a 25% chance of landing on a specific tile in a row.

After that, the odds shift. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you click on a alternative option first and aim for less risky choices early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The meta-layer is that your probabilities can be influenced during an attempt by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I focused my power boosts toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth possible that would increase my odds of landing on monsters of that variety.
• On a different attempt, I developed my adventurer around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes every time I claimed a reward.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to engage with to allow you to tweak numbers according to your strategy.

An Ever-Present Tension

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have a likely outcome to hit the desired tile but end up landing on an enemy that would take out your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and decide when to continue selecting or to advance to the next floor instead of pushing your luck.

Items like destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, as do some character abilities. An adventurer's special power, charged after selecting four tiles, enables you to choose a vertical column instead of a horizontal line during that action. Should you use this move wisely, you can save that move for the right moment to sidestep a dangerous choice. You'll find an astonishing level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has a final update to go until the final game is launched. An additional hero and a new boss are scheduled to arrive before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release may not be far behind, but the game's developers haven't announced a final date yet.

A Parting Recommendation

Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you should consider put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of little secrets and storing my run rewards every session to access a constant flow of permanent unlocks, featuring new characters and items available for acquisition during a run. I still haven't 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 complete journey.