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Following my time with more than 200 fresh titles this year, I am officially wrapping things up on 2025. My year-end list is live, and I feel content with the final results, accepting that a host of stellar titles may have dropped through the cracks. At this point, it's plan is to but sit back, unplug a little, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— ah crap, found another brilliant title. So much for my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

With my laid-back sessions, typically earmarked for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of high stakes risk and reward. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Tactical Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I've ever played. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor to find the sun, which has gone missing from its world. In practice, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer possessing unique stats and abilities, fight through each level of monsters, pick up some passive buffs (in the form of teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

The way you effectively complete a area, though. Whenever you start another stage, you see a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the four rows, but which square you end up on is a matter of probability.

You could encounter a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of landing on a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your chances are recalculated. So do you press your luck, or do you click on a different row first and attempt some less risky choices early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic in action in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. As an instance, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I put all my power boosts toward brute force and chose every teeth I could that would boost my chances of landing on monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around treasure chests and combined that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I secured loot.

The build options are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to work with to allow you to tweak probabilities the way you want.

A Constant Gamble

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. You constantly face the possibility that you have a high probability to hit the square you want but end up landing a monster that would deplete your final hit point. Every move is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and decide when to press onward or when to move on to the following level as opposed to risking it all.

Tools such as destructive ordnance help cut down the chance, just like some character abilities. An adventurer's special power, charged after selecting four tiles, enables you to click on a vertical line in place of a horizontal row during that action. By employing this move wisely, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking degree of depth in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has another update to go before the complete edition is released. An additional hero and a new boss are expected to drop sometime in January. The official version probably isn't far behind, but the studio haven't announced a concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I have been completely engrossed with it, discovering its hidden nuances and saving my accumulated currency in each run to access a constant flow of permanent unlocks, featuring new characters and items purchasable mid-attempt. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I will remain pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Count me in for the entire experience.