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After playing more than 200 new releases this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, even knowing a host of excellent games probably slipped through the cracks. At this point, it's nothing for me to do but sit back, take a short break, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a great game. There go my plans!

A Premature Contender Emerges

During my laid-back sessions, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what might become my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of high stakes peril and prize. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy discovering a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's unlike anything I've previously experienced. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. Mechanically, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer who has parameters and powers, fight through each level of enemies, acquire some passive buffs (which are teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

How you effectively complete a chamber, however. Every time you start another stage, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To proceed, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you land in is a matter of probability.

You could encounter a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a 25% chance of landing on any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. So do you press your luck, or do you click on a alternative option first and attempt some safer moves early? That's the risk-reward dynamic in action in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing when you acquire an understanding of it.

Manipulating Probability

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced over the course of a session by gathering teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. As an instance, you may obtain a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about manipulating math as best you can to have a higher chance at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I invested my stat upgrades toward brute force and chose every teeth I could that would increase my odds of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to engage with to enable you to influence the odds to your preference.

A Persistent Risk

Unsurprisingly, it remains a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have a likely outcome to select the square you want but ultimately choose on an enemy that would eliminate your final hit point. All selections is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you work through a stage and decide when to continue selecting or when to move on to the following level instead of testing fate.

Tools such as destructive ordnance help cut down the chance, as do some special skills. A particular character's special power, charged after selecting four tiles, lets gamers to choose a vertical line in place of a horizontal line for that move. By employing your cards right, you can hold that ability for the right moment to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking degree of depth in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is currently in early access, and it has at least one more update scheduled until the final game is launched. An additional hero and a fresh guardian 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 concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

Regardless of when it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, uncovering each of little secrets and storing my run rewards every session to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, such as fresh adventurers and items available for acquisition while playing. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I will remain pursuing that objective when the full version launches. I'm committed for the complete journey.