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Following my time with in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the ultimate rankings, accepting that plenty of fantastic releases likely fell by the wayside. Currently, my only plan is to other than unwind, disconnect briefly, and maybe enjoy a refreshing hike in the— oh no, found another great game. There go my plans!

A Premature Contender Emerges

With my off-hours play, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of high stakes peril and prize. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you relish in knowing about a game before it's popular, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I've ever played. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, going down level by level in search of the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. In practice, this results in some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero possessing unique attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, pick up some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Novel Core Mechanic

The method by which you effectively complete a area, however. Each instance you enter a new floor, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile holds a monster, a reward cache, 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 up to chance.

You may face a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of hitting a particular space in a row.

Subsequently, your chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you choose on a safer line first and aim for less risky choices early? This is the push-your-luck gameplay on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by collecting teeth that change what things you're more attracted to. As an instance, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• In one run, I put all my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth possible that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• On a different attempt, I built my character around treasure chests and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I claimed a reward.

The build options are not endless, but there's enough to experiment with to allow you to tweak probabilities to your preference.

A Persistent Gamble

Of course, it's still a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have a high probability to hit the square you want but ultimately choose on an enemy that would take out your final hit point. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and choose whether to keep clicking or to advance to the next floor rather than risking it all.

Tools such as explosive devices help cut down the chance, just like some hero powers. One hero's unique ability, powered up by clearing four squares, enables you to choose a vertical line in place of a horizontal row on a turn. By employing this move wisely, you can reserve that option for the right moment to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising degree of depth in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is remaining in early access, and it has at least one more update to go before the final game is released. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The full launch likely won't be far behind, but the game's developers haven't set a final date yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

Regardless of when its 1.0 launch occurs, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of small details and banking my earned gold in each run to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, such as new characters and items purchasable during a run. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I'll still be working on that task when the official release drops. Count me in for the long haul.