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Following my time with in excess of 200 recent games this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, even knowing plenty of stellar titles likely fell by the wayside. Currently, my only job is to other than unwind, take a short break, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, found another amazing experience. So much for my intentions!

A Premature Contender Emerges

With my casual gaming time, usually reserved 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 major consequence danger and payoff. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you relish in knowing about a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's a departure from all I'm familiar with. The setup is that you must venture into a dungeon, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. In practice, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Select a character who has stats and abilities, fight through each level of monsters, acquire some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Straightforward, right!

The Unique Core Mechanic

The method by which you effectively complete a dungeon room, however. Each instance you enter a new floor, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. Each square features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you end up on is up to chance.

You may face a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a quarter likelihood of selecting any given square in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you take the risk, or do you choose on a different row first and attempt some safer moves early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop an understanding of it.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by gathering teeth that alter which objects you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics as best you can to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I put all my stat upgrades toward brute force and chose every teeth I could that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
• On a different attempt, I built my character around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I claimed a reward.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but there's enough to work with to allow you to tweak the odds the way you want.

A Constant Gamble

Naturally, it's still a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have an 80% chance to land on the square you want but end up landing on an enemy that would eliminate your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you work through a stage and decide when to keep clicking or to advance to the next floor as opposed to testing fate.

Tools such as explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some special skills. One hero's unique ability, charged after clearing four squares, lets gamers to click on a column in place of a row during that action. By employing your cards right, you can reserve that option for a crucial point 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 complete edition is launched. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The full launch may not be long after, but the game's developers haven't announced a concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

Regardless of when its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of little secrets and storing my run rewards in each run to access a constant flow of permanent unlocks, including new characters and items available for acquisition during a run. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I have a sense I will remain working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. I'm committed for the long haul.