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After playing more than 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I am at peace with the ultimate rankings, even knowing numerous fantastic releases may have dropped through the cracks. Currently, my only job is to but sit back, take a short break, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, stumbled upon a great game. There go my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Front-Runner Appears

In my more casual gaming time, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, 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 reimagines a traditional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of major consequence peril and prize. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you take pride being aware of a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your gaming budget.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's unlike anything I've ever played. The premise is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has gone missing from its world. In practice, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer who has stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, acquire some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Unique Central System

The way you actually clear a area, is unique. Whenever you start another stage, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To make a move, you choose on one of the four rows, but the exact space you end up on is a matter of probability.

You may face a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a 25% chance of hitting any given square in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you click on a different row first and aim for more cautious selections early? This is the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get its rhythm.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I put all my power boosts toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around treasure chests and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I claimed a reward.

The build options are not endless, but they are sufficient to experiment with to allow you to tweak the odds according to your strategy.

A Persistent Tension

Unsurprisingly, it remains a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have an 80% chance to land on the preferred space but wind up hitting a monster that would deplete your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you work through a stage and decide when to press onward or to advance to the subsequent stage instead of pushing your luck.

Consumables including explosive devices help cut down the chance, similar to some hero powers. A particular character's signature move, charged after selecting four tiles, enables you to choose a column in place of a horizontal row during that action. By employing this move wisely, you can save that move for the right moment to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising degree of depth in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has at least one more update scheduled until the complete edition is unleashed. A new character and a fresh guardian are planned for release by the end of January. The official version probably isn't far behind, but the studio haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Final Endorsement

Regardless of when it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of hidden nuances and storing my run rewards per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, including fresh adventurers and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll continue working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the long haul.