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After playing in excess of 200 new releases this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the final results, accepting that a host of fantastic releases probably slipped by the wayside. Now, there's nothing for me to do but sit back, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, stumbled upon a great game. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

A Premature Front-Runner Appears

In my more casual gaming time, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've discovered what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a classic dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of major consequence danger and payoff. View this an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, sample Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I've ever played. The setup is that you must venture into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from this mythical realm. In practice, that makes for some familiar roguelike structure. Choose an adventurer who has attributes and skills, clear floor after floor of foes, acquire some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Core Mechanic

The method by which you truly navigate a chamber, however. Every time you start another stage, you see a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you just select on one of the four rows, but which square you select is up to chance.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a one-in-four probability of selecting a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you click on a different row first and try to make less risky choices early? Herein lies the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The procedural hook is that your odds can be manipulated through a run by gathering teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. As an instance, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a better shot at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I focused my power boosts toward brute force and picked as many teeth I could that would improve my probability of landing on monsters of that variety.
• On a different attempt, I built my character around loot caches and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes every time I claimed a reward.

The build options are not endless, but it provides ample to engage with to enable you to influence numbers to your preference.

A Constant Tension

Of course, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have an 80% chance to select the desired tile but end up landing a monster that would take out your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and determine if to press onward or to advance to the subsequent stage rather than testing fate.

Items like enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, just like some character abilities. A particular character's special power, powered up by making four moves, enables you to choose a vertical column rather than a horizontal line on a turn. If you play this move wisely, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising level of strategy in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is currently in early access, and it has another update scheduled before the final game is released. 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 committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

Regardless of when its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I've been thoroughly captivated with it, uncovering each of little secrets and saving my accumulated currency in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, featuring new characters and items available for acquisition during a run. To this day, I have not completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I'll continue pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Count me in for the complete journey.