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Following my time with in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I am officially wrapping things up on 2025. My year-end list is out in the world, and I feel content with the concluding selections, accepting that numerous stellar titles likely fell through the cracks. Now, there's job is to other than unwind, take a short break, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— oh no, discovered one more brilliant title. And just like that, goodbye to my intentions!

An Early Front-Runner Appears

In my more off-hours play, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered what could be my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of high stakes risk and reward. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your wallet for unique titles.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I've ever played. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper to find the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. In practice, that makes for some familiar roguelike structure. Choose an adventurer possessing unique stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of foes, acquire some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few area guardians. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Central System

How you truly navigate a area, though. Whenever you start another stage, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces either contains a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To proceed, you just select on one of the four rows, but which square you land in is a matter of probability.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a one-in-four probability of landing on a particular space in a row.

Subsequently, your chances are recalculated. So do you go for it, or do you choose on a safer line first and aim for less risky choices early? That's the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get its rhythm.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped over the course of a session by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're more attracted to. As an instance, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• In one run, I put all my stat upgrades toward brute force and picked as many teeth I could that would increase my odds of landing on monsters aligned with that strength.
• In another run, I developed my adventurer around treasure chests and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I claimed a reward.

The build options are not endless, but they are sufficient to work with to enable you to influence probabilities the way you want.

An Ever-Present Risk

Naturally, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have a likely outcome to select the desired tile but ultimately choose a foe that would take out your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and choose whether to press onward or to advance to the next floor rather than risking it all.

Consumables including enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, as do some hero powers. A particular character's special power, powered up by selecting four tiles, allows players to select a column rather than a horizontal line on a turn. Should you use this move wisely, you can save that move for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has a final update scheduled until the full version is unleashed. A new character and a new boss are scheduled to arrive by the end of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be much later, but the game's developers haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, discovering its small details and storing my run rewards in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, such as fresh adventurers and items available for acquisition mid-attempt. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I have a sense I'll still be working on that task when the full version launches. Count me in for the entire experience.