🔗 Share this article

After playing more than 200 new releases this year, It's time to turning the page on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I feel content with the concluding selections, despite being aware plenty of excellent games may have dropped by the wayside. At this point, it's nothing for me to do except relax, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— oh no, discovered one more brilliant title. So much for my intentions!

An Early Front-Runner Appears

During my laid-back sessions, typically earmarked for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of significant risk risk and reward. Consider this an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy in knowing about a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your gaming budget.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The concept is that you must venture into a dungeon, descending floor after floor to find the sun, which has disappeared from this mythical realm. When you play, this creates some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero with their own stats and abilities, clear floor after floor of enemies, collect some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Central System

How you effectively complete a dungeon room, however. Every time you begin a fresh level, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the four rows, but which square you end up on is determined by luck.

You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of hitting a particular space in a row.

Then, you'll chances are recalculated. So do you take the risk, or do you opt on a safer line first and aim for safer moves early? That's the risk-reward dynamic on display in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop a feel for it.

Shaping the Odds

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped during an attempt by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're more attracted to. 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 reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• In one run, I focused my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth I could that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• On a different attempt, I constructed my hero around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I secured loot.

The build options are limited, but it provides ample to experiment with to enable you to influence the odds the way you want.

A Persistent Risk

Of course, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have an 80% chance to select the preferred space but wind up hitting a foe that would eliminate your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you clear a floor out and decide when to continue selecting or to proceed to the subsequent stage as opposed to testing fate.

Consumables including explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, as do some character abilities. An adventurer's unique ability, activated once making four moves, allows players to choose a column in place of a horizontal line on a turn. If you play this move wisely, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. You'll find an astonishing degree of depth in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is currently in early access, and it has at least one more update scheduled before the full version is released. Another playable adventurer and a additional end-level foe are expected to drop sometime in January. The full launch may not be long after, but the game's developers haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Parting Thought

Whenever its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, discovering its little secrets and banking my earned gold in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, such as new characters and items I can buy during a run. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I suspect I'll still be pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Sign me up for the entire experience.