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Having experienced more than 200 new releases this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I am at peace with the final results, despite being aware numerous excellent games likely fell through the cracks. Currently, my only plan is to other than unwind, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, discovered one more brilliant title. There go my intentions!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

In my more off-hours play, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered potentially my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a traditional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of high stakes risk and reward. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride discovering a game before it's popular, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I've previously experienced. The concept is that you must venture into a dungeon, going down level by level to find the sun, which has gone missing from its world. In practice, this results in some standard crawl progression. Select a character who has stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, pick up some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and defeat a few stage-ending champions. Easy to grasp!

The Distinctive Gameplay Loop

How you truly navigate a chamber, however. Every time you start another stage, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To proceed, you just select on one of the four rows, but the exact space you land in is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a one-in-four probability of landing on a particular space in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you opt on a different row first and aim for safer moves early? Herein lies the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating when you acquire an understanding of it.

Manipulating Probability

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated through a run by collecting teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. As an instance, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about manipulating math as best you can to have a improved likelihood at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I invested my power boosts toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I built my character around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I opened a chest.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but they are sufficient to work with to let you manipulate numbers to your preference.

An Ever-Present Tension

Of course, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the risk that you have a high probability to select the preferred space but ultimately choose on an enemy that would take out your final hit point. Every move is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and choose whether to continue selecting or to proceed to the next floor instead of pushing your luck.

Items like destructive ordnance aid in reducing the chance, just like some hero powers. An adventurer's special power, activated once clearing four squares, enables you to choose a column in place of a horizontal line on a turn. By employing this move wisely, you can save that move for an optimal time to circumvent a perilous selection. You'll find an astonishing level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is currently in its preview phase, and it has at least one more update planned until the final game is unleashed. A new character and a new boss are planned for release sometime in January. The official version may not be long after, but the game's developers haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Recommendation

Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of small details and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, featuring additional heroes and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I suspect I'll continue working on that task when the official release drops. Sign me up for the complete journey.