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Following my time with more than 200 recent games this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I feel content with the concluding selections, even knowing a host of fantastic releases likely fell under the radar. Now, there's job is to but sit back, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, found another brilliant title. There go my intentions!

An Early Contender Emerges

In my more off-hours play, usually reserved for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a conventional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of significant risk peril and prize. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I've ever played. The setup is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. When you play, that makes for some familiar roguelike structure. Select a character with their own stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, acquire some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Central System

The way you truly navigate a area, is unique. Whenever you begin a fresh level, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you select is determined by luck.

You might see a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of hitting a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you opt on a alternative option first and aim for more cautious selections early? That's the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop an understanding of it.

Manipulating Probability

The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I focused my power boosts toward brute force and selected all the teeth possible that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• In another run, I constructed my hero around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I secured loot.

The strategic possibilities are limited, but there's enough to experiment with to let you manipulate the odds according to your strategy.

A Constant Risk

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have an 80% chance to select the square you want but end up landing on an enemy that would eliminate your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you clear a floor out and determine if to press onward or to advance to the subsequent stage as opposed to testing fate.

Items like explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, similar to some hero powers. A particular character's signature move, powered up by making four moves, allows players to select a vertical column in place of a row on a turn. Should you use this move wisely, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is currently in its preview phase, and it has a final update to go before the complete edition is launched. A new character and a fresh guardian are expected to drop before the conclusion of January. The full launch may not be far behind, but the game's developers haven't set a final date yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

Whenever its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, discovering its small details and storing my run rewards in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, such as new characters and items purchasable mid-attempt. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I have a sense I will remain attempting that goal when the official release drops. Sign me up for the complete journey.