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After playing more than 200 new releases this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I feel content with the concluding selections, despite being aware numerous fantastic releases likely fell by the wayside. Now, there's nothing for me to do except relax, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a refreshing hike in the— oh no, discovered one more brilliant title. So much for my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Front-Runner Appears

In my more laid-back sessions, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, I've discovered what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a conventional labyrinth explorer into a probability-fueled game of significant risk risk and reward. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride discovering a game before it's popular, sample Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has vanished from its world. When you play, this results in some standard crawl progression. Select a character possessing unique parameters and powers, clear floor after floor of foes, pick up some stat improvements (which are teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Central System

The way you actually clear a chamber, however. Whenever you begin a fresh level, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you end up on is a matter of probability.

You may face a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of hitting a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your chances are recalculated. So do you go for it, or do you click on a safer line first and aim for less risky choices early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

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

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• On a particular session, I invested my stat upgrades toward brute force and picked as many teeth possible that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• On a different attempt, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would debuff nearby foes whenever I claimed a reward.

The build options are limited, but there's enough to experiment with to allow you to tweak numbers to your preference.

A Constant Gamble

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have a likely outcome to land on the square you want but end up landing on an enemy that would take out your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and determine if to press onward or when to move on to the following level rather than testing fate.

Tools such as explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, as do some hero powers. A particular character's special power, charged after selecting four tiles, allows players to select a vertical line instead of a horizontal line during that action. If you play this move wisely, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to circumvent a perilous selection. You'll find an astonishing amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has at least one more update scheduled until the final game is released. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are planned for release by the end of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be much later, but the game's developers haven't announced a final date yet.

A Parting Thought

Whenever it's fully released, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been completely engrossed with it, uncovering each of little secrets and banking my earned gold in each run to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, such as new characters and items available for acquisition while playing. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I suspect I'll still be pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the entire experience.