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Having experienced in excess of 200 recent games this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is live, and I'm satisfied with the final results, even knowing numerous fantastic releases likely fell by the wayside. Currently, my only job is to except relax, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a pleasant stroll in the— well, shoot, stumbled upon a great game. There go my intentions!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

In my more laid-back sessions, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've discovered what might become my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a classic labyrinth explorer into a probability-fueled game of high stakes risk and reward. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Calculated Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's unlike anything I'm familiar with. The concept is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. When you play, this creates some standard crawl progression. Select a character with their own attributes and skills, clear floor after floor of monsters, acquire some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Novel Central System

How you truly navigate a chamber, however. Whenever you start another stage, you see a 4x4 grid 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 the specific tile you land in is determined by luck.

You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You initially will have a 25% chance of hitting a specific tile in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. So do you take the risk, or do you choose on a different row first and try to make safer moves early? That's the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get an understanding of it.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will reduce the probability of encountering a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers to the utmost to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• In one run, I focused my attribute improvements toward brute force and picked as many teeth possible that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• On a different attempt, I constructed my hero around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I opened a chest.

The build options are limited, but it provides ample to engage with to enable you to influence the odds the way you want.

An Ever-Present Tension

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have a high probability to land on the desired tile but ultimately choose on an enemy that would deplete your remaining life. Every move is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and decide when to continue selecting or to proceed to the subsequent stage as opposed to pushing your luck.

Items like destructive ordnance help cut down the chance, just like some special skills. One hero's signature move, charged after selecting four tiles, lets gamers to click on a vertical column rather than a horizontal line during that action. If you play your cards right, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to circumvent a perilous selection. You'll find an astonishing amount of nuance in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is currently in early access, and it has another update to go before the complete edition is unleashed. An additional hero and a new boss are planned for release before the conclusion of January. The official version may not be long after, but the creators haven't announced a final date yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

No matter when the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I have been positively obsessed with it, finding all of little secrets and storing my run rewards every session to unlock a steady stream of permanent unlocks, featuring fresh adventurers and items purchasable while playing. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I get the feeling I'll still be pursuing that objective when the official release drops. Count me in for the long haul.