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Having experienced in excess of 200 recent games this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My year-end list is published, and I feel content with the concluding selections, accepting that a host of excellent games likely fell by the wayside. Currently, my only plan is to except relax, unplug a little, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a amazing experience. There go my plans!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

With my laid-back sessions, typically earmarked for a handful of quirky titles, I've encountered potentially my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a classic labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of significant risk peril and prize. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The setup is that you must venture into a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has disappeared from this mythical realm. In practice, this creates some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer with their own stats and abilities, fight through each level of foes, acquire some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Central System

The way you actually clear a area, is unique. Every time you start another stage, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To explore a room, you just select on one of the four rows, but which square you end up on is a matter of probability.

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 particular space in a row.

Then, you'll chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you opt on a alternative option first and try to make safer moves early? That's the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The meta-layer is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by collecting teeth that alter which objects you're drawn toward. As an instance, you might get a perk that will reduce the probability of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about manipulating math optimally to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• In one run, I invested my stat upgrades toward brute force and picked as many teeth possible that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I built my character around treasure chests and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are limited, but they are sufficient to experiment with to enable you to influence numbers the way you want.

A Persistent Gamble

Of course, it's still a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have an 80% chance to land on the square you want but wind up hitting on an enemy that would deplete your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you work through a stage and choose whether to keep clicking or to proceed to the next floor instead of testing fate.

Consumables including destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some character abilities. A particular character's special power, activated once making four moves, lets gamers to choose a column instead of a horizontal row on a turn. If you play this strategically, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has a final update planned before the final game is unleashed. A new character and a new boss are expected to drop by the end of January. The full launch likely won't be much later, but the game's developers haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Final Thought

Regardless of when it's fully released, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I have been completely engrossed with it, discovering its little secrets and storing my run rewards every session to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, featuring additional heroes and items available for acquisition during a run. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I'll continue attempting that goal when the official release drops. Sign me up for the complete journey.