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After playing in excess of 200 recent games this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is published, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, despite being aware plenty of fantastic releases probably slipped through the cracks. Now, there's nothing for me to do but sit back, take a short break, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— ah crap, discovered one more great game. There go my intentions!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

During my laid-back sessions, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've come across what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a classic dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of high stakes danger and payoff. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride discovering a game before it's cool, 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 premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, going down level by level in search of the sun, which has gone missing from its world. When you play, this creates some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero possessing unique attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, acquire some passive buffs (which are teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Unique Central System

How you effectively complete a chamber, however. Each instance you begin a fresh level, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you select is determined by luck.

You might see a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of landing on a particular space in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you click on a safer line first and attempt some safer moves early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get a feel for 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 drawn toward. As an instance, you might get a perk that will reduce the probability of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I invested my power boosts toward melee prowess and selected all the teeth possible that would increase my odds of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I constructed my hero around loot caches and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I secured loot.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but it provides ample to experiment with to let you manipulate numbers the way you want.

A Constant Tension

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have a likely outcome to select the preferred space but ultimately choose on an enemy that would deplete your final hit point. Every move is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and choose whether to press onward or to proceed to the next floor instead of pushing your luck.

Tools such as destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some hero powers. An adventurer's signature move, charged after selecting four tiles, enables you to select a vertical line instead of a horizontal row on a turn. If you play this move wisely, you can hold that ability for the right moment to avoid a risky decision. There's a shocking level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is remaining in early access, and it has a final update to go until the final game is released. A new character and a additional end-level foe are planned for release by the end of January. The official version likely won't be much later, but the studio haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Recommendation

Whenever its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of small details and saving my accumulated currency every session to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, featuring fresh adventurers and items I can buy mid-attempt. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I'll still be working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the long haul.