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Following my time with in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, despite being aware plenty of excellent games may have dropped through the cracks. Currently, my only plan is to but sit back, take a short break, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, found another amazing experience. There go my peaceful respite!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

In my more off-hours play, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered what might become my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of significant risk danger and payoff. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, sample Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I've ever played. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. Mechanically, this results in some standard crawl progression. Select a character possessing unique stats and abilities, fight through each level of enemies, acquire some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Core Mechanic

The method by which you actually clear a area, however. Every time you begin a fresh level, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To explore a room, you just select on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you land in is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a 25% chance of hitting any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you click on a alternative option first and aim for less risky choices early? This is the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a better shot at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I put all my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and picked as many teeth I could that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, I built my character around treasure chests and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I claimed a reward.

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

A Persistent Tension

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There remains the possibility that you have a high probability to land on the preferred space but wind up hitting a monster that would take out your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and decide when to continue selecting or when to move on to the subsequent stage rather than pushing your luck.

Consumables including destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, just like some hero powers. An adventurer's signature move, charged after selecting four tiles, enables you to click on a column instead of a horizontal line during that action. If you play this strategically, you can save that move for the right moment to circumvent a perilous selection. You'll find an astonishing level of strategy in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in development, and it has at least one more update scheduled until the final game is unleashed. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The full launch likely won't be much later, but the creators haven't announced a specific release window yet.

A Parting Endorsement

Whenever the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been completely engrossed with it, uncovering each of hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency every session to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, including new characters and items I can buy during a run. I still haven't reached the bottom, and I suspect I'll still be attempting that goal when the official release drops. I'm committed for the long haul.