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Following my time with more than 200 fresh titles this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, despite being aware numerous stellar titles probably slipped through the cracks. At this point, it's plan is to other than unwind, take a short break, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a great game. There go my plans!

An Early Front-Runner Appears

With my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what could be my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a classic dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of high stakes peril and prize. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride being aware of a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's different from everything I've ever played. The premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. When you play, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero possessing unique parameters and powers, clear floor after floor of enemies, collect some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Core Mechanic

The way you actually clear a dungeon room, is unique. Each instance you begin a fresh level, you see a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the four rows, but which square you select is a matter of probability.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of selecting a specific tile in a row.

After that, the odds shift. So do you take the risk, or do you opt on a different row first and aim for safer moves early? That's the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing when you acquire an understanding of it.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by picking up teeth that change what things 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 also decrease the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a better shot at selecting the optimal square.
• During one attempt, I focused my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth I could that would improve my probability of landing on monsters of that variety.
• On a different attempt, I developed my adventurer around treasure chests and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I opened a chest.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to engage with to allow you to tweak numbers to your preference.

A Constant Risk

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have a high probability to select the desired tile but wind up hitting on an enemy that would deplete your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and determine if to continue selecting or when to move on to the subsequent stage rather than risking it all.

Items like destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some special skills. A particular character's signature move, powered up by making four moves, lets gamers to choose a vertical column rather than a horizontal row on a turn. Should you use this move wisely, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising degree of depth in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has another update scheduled before the full version is unleashed. An additional hero and a new boss are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The 1.0 release may not be long after, but the creators haven't announced a specific release window yet.

A Parting Thought

Whenever its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, uncovering each of small details and saving my accumulated currency every session to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, such as fresh adventurers and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I'll continue working on that task when the official release drops. I'm committed for the entire experience.