🔗 Share this article

Following my time with in excess of 200 new releases this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, even knowing numerous fantastic releases probably slipped through the cracks. Currently, my only job is to except relax, unplug a little, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— ah crap, discovered one more great game. There go my plans!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

With my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what might become my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar procedural dungeon crawler for Windows PC that breaks down a traditional dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of high stakes peril and prize. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride discovering a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's different from everything I've ever played. The premise is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has vanished from its world. In practice, this results in some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer who has stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, collect some permanent upgrades (which are teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Core Mechanic

How you effectively complete a dungeon room, however. Every time you start another stage, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. All spaces holds a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you just select on one of the four rows, but the exact space you land in is a matter of probability.

You may face a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of hitting any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your chances are recalculated. So do you take the risk, or do you opt on a safer line first and aim for more cautious selections early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop a feel for it.

Manipulating Probability

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by gathering teeth that modify the types of squares you're more attracted to. As an instance, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• During one attempt, I focused my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth I could that would increase my odds of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes whenever I secured loot.

The build options are limited, but they are sufficient to work with to enable you to influence the odds to your preference.

An Ever-Present Tension

Of course, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have an 80% chance to land on the preferred space but end up landing a monster that would deplete your final hit point. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and choose whether to press onward or when to move on to the subsequent stage rather than pushing your luck.

Tools such as explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, as do some special skills. A particular character's special power, charged after clearing four squares, allows players to select a vertical line instead of a horizontal line for that move. If you play this strategically, you can save that move for a crucial point to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising degree of depth in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has a final update scheduled until the complete edition is launched. An additional hero and a additional end-level foe are expected to drop before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release may not be far behind, but the studio haven't announced a final date yet.

A Final Recommendation

No matter when it's fully released, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been positively obsessed with it, discovering its little secrets and banking my earned gold in each run to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, such as new characters and items purchasable while playing. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I suspect I'll continue attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the complete journey.