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After playing in excess of 200 recent games this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I feel content with the concluding selections, despite being aware plenty of excellent games may have dropped through the cracks. Currently, my only plan is to except relax, unplug a little, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a brilliant title. And just like that, goodbye to my plans!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

In my more casual gaming time, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered potentially my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional labyrinth explorer into a probability-fueled game of high stakes peril and prize. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you relish being aware of a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your wallet for unique titles.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I've ever played. The premise is that you must venture into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. In practice, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero possessing unique parameters and powers, fight through each level of foes, acquire some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Simple enough!

The Novel Central System

How you truly navigate a dungeon room, is unique. Whenever you enter a new floor, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the exact space you end up on is determined by luck.

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

Then, you'll odds shift. So do you press your luck, or do you opt on a different row first and try to make safer moves early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop its rhythm.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by picking up teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. For example, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about manipulating math optimally to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• In one run, I focused my attribute improvements toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters aligned with that strength.
• On a different attempt, I built my character around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I secured loot.

The customization choices are not endless, but there's enough to experiment with to allow you to tweak the odds the way you want.

An Ever-Present Risk

Of course, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have a likely outcome to select the desired tile but ultimately choose a monster that would take out your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and decide when to continue selecting or to proceed to the subsequent stage rather than pushing your luck.

Tools such as destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some character abilities. One hero's signature move, activated once selecting four tiles, allows players to choose a vertical column in place of a horizontal line on a turn. Should you use your cards right, you can save that move for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. You'll find an astonishing level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has at least one more update scheduled until the full version is released. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are expected to drop by the end of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be far behind, but the game's developers haven't set a final date yet.

A Parting Thought

Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been completely engrossed with it, discovering its little secrets and banking my earned gold every session to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, such as new characters and items I can buy during a run. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll continue pursuing that objective when the official release drops. I'm committed for the complete journey.