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Having experienced more than 200 recent games this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, even knowing a host of excellent games likely fell by the wayside. At this point, it's plan is to but sit back, disconnect briefly, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— oh no, discovered one more great game. There go my peaceful respite!

A Premature Contender Emerges

In my more off-hours play, usually reserved 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 traditional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of significant risk risk and reward. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Calculated Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I've ever played. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has disappeared from its world. When you play, this creates some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer possessing unique attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, pick up some stat improvements (which are teeth), and defeat a few area guardians. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Core Mechanic

The method by which you effectively complete a dungeon room, though. Whenever you begin a fresh level, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. All spaces either contains a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you just select on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you select is up to chance.

You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a 25% chance of landing on any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. So do you go for it, or do you choose on a safer line first and try to make more cautious selections early? This is the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get its rhythm.

Manipulating Probability

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by gathering teeth that change what things you're more attracted to. For example, you could acquire a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a reward too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I put all my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and picked as many teeth I could that would increase my odds of landing on monsters of that variety.
• On a different attempt, I built my character around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would debuff nearby foes every time I secured loot.

The customization choices are not endless, but there's enough to engage with to let you manipulate probabilities the way you want.

A Persistent Gamble

Of course, it remains a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have an 80% chance to select the desired tile but ultimately choose a foe that would take out your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you clear a floor out and decide when to press onward or to proceed to the subsequent stage rather than pushing your luck.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some hero powers. An adventurer's signature move, powered up by selecting four tiles, enables you to click on a vertical column rather than a row on a turn. If you play this move wisely, you can save that move for the right moment to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has a final update planned before the full version is released. Another playable adventurer and a new boss are expected to drop before the conclusion of January. The official version probably isn't much later, but the creators haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

Whenever it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been positively obsessed with it, discovering its little secrets and storing my run rewards every session to access a constant flow of permanent unlocks, including new characters and items I can buy while playing. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I will remain pursuing that objective when the full version launches. I'm committed for the entire experience.