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Following my time with in excess of 200 recent games this year, It's time to turning the page on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, accepting that plenty of fantastic releases may have dropped through the cracks. At this point, it's plan is to other than unwind, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— ah crap, stumbled upon a brilliant title. There go my peaceful respite!

A Premature Contender Emerges

In my more laid-back sessions, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've discovered what might become my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a classic dungeon crawler into a luck-based game of high stakes risk and reward. Consider this an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

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 are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor to find the sun, which has disappeared from this mythical realm. In practice, that makes for some familiar roguelike structure. Choose an adventurer with their own stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, collect some permanent upgrades (represented as teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp!

The Novel Core Mechanic

The way you effectively complete a dungeon room, though. Whenever you start another stage, you're shown a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To make a move, you just select on one of the four rows, but the exact space you end up on is a matter of probability.

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

After that, the probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you click on a different row first and attempt some safer moves early? Herein lies the push-your-luck gameplay on display in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing when you acquire its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by collecting teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. For example, you could acquire a perk that will reduce the probability of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a improved likelihood at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I invested my stat upgrades toward brute force and selected all the teeth possible that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters aligned with that strength.
• On a different attempt, I developed my adventurer around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I claimed a reward.

The build options are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to engage with to allow you to tweak probabilities to your preference.

An Ever-Present Risk

Of course, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have a high probability to hit the desired tile but end up landing a foe that would deplete your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you navigate a level and determine if to press onward or to advance to the following level as opposed to testing fate.

Items like destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, as do some hero powers. One hero's unique ability, powered up by selecting four tiles, enables you to click on a vertical line rather than a row for that move. Should you use this strategically, you can save that move for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. You'll find an astonishing degree of depth in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in development, and it has a final update to go before the complete edition is launched. Another playable adventurer and a new boss are expected to drop by the end of January. The official version may not be far behind, but the studio haven't announced a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Endorsement

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you should consider put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been positively obsessed with it, discovering its small details and storing my run rewards in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of permanent unlocks, such as additional heroes and items I can buy during a run. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I'll continue pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Sign me up for the long haul.