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After playing well over 200 new releases this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is published, and I'm satisfied with the ultimate rankings, despite being aware plenty of stellar titles may have dropped through the cracks. Currently, my only job is to except relax, take a short break, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— oh no, stumbled upon a brilliant title. So much for my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

During my off-hours play, typically earmarked for a selection of unusual games, I've come across what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of high stakes danger and payoff. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy in knowing about a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's unlike anything I'm familiar with. The setup is that you must venture into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. In practice, this creates some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero who has stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, collect some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

How you actually clear a area, is unique. Every time you enter a new floor, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you choose on one of the four rows, but the exact space you land in is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of selecting a specific tile in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you click on a different row first and attempt some more cautious selections early? This is the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating once you get an understanding of it.

Shaping the Odds

The meta-layer is that your probabilities can be influenced 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 lower your chances of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a higher chance at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I put all my attribute improvements toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth I could that would improve my probability of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I built my character around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes every time I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are limited, but it provides ample to experiment with to let you manipulate numbers the way you want.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the possibility that you have a likely outcome to hit the square you want but ultimately choose on an enemy that would take out your remaining life. Every move is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and determine if to continue selecting or to proceed to the subsequent stage as opposed to risking it all.

Consumables including destructive ordnance aid in reducing the chance, similar to some character abilities. An adventurer's signature move, activated once making four moves, allows players to select a vertical column in place of a row during that action. Should you use your cards right, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has at least one more update to go before the full version is unleashed. A new character and a fresh guardian are scheduled to arrive before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be much later, but the creators haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Recommendation

Regardless of when it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been thoroughly captivated with it, discovering its small details and storing my run rewards per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, including additional heroes and items available for acquisition during a run. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I will remain working on that task when the full version launches. Count me in for the entire experience.