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Following my time with more than 200 recent games this year, I'm formally closing the book on 2025. My year-end list is published, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, accepting that a host of fantastic releases likely fell under the radar. At this point, it's job is to other than unwind, unplug a little, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, found another brilliant title. So much for my plans!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

With my off-hours play, typically earmarked for a few oddball curiosities, I've discovered what might become my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a conventional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of high stakes danger and payoff. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it's popular, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your wallet for unique titles.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's unlike anything I've ever played. The premise 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. Mechanically, this creates some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer with their own attributes and skills, defeat enemies on every stage of enemies, acquire some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Easy to grasp!

The Novel Central System

The way you truly navigate a chamber, though. Every time you start another stage, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. All spaces features a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you select is a matter of probability.

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

After that, the odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you click on a safer line first and attempt some more cautious selections early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay on display in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop a feel for it.

Shaping the Odds

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by gathering teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. As an instance, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math as best you can to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I focused my attribute improvements toward melee prowess and chose every teeth possible that would increase my odds of landing on monsters of that variety.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around treasure chests and combined that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters each time I claimed a reward.

The build options are not endless, but there's enough to engage with to enable you to influence the odds the way you want.

An Ever-Present Risk

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the chance that you have a likely outcome to hit the preferred space but wind up hitting a monster that would eliminate your remaining life. Each click is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you clear a floor out and choose whether to continue selecting or when to move on to the following level instead of pushing your luck.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, similar to some special skills. An adventurer's special power, charged after clearing four squares, enables you to choose a vertical line rather than a horizontal row during that action. If you play your cards right, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising level of strategy in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has at least one more update scheduled before the full version is launched. A new character and a new boss are planned for release by the end of January. The full launch likely won't be far behind, but the creators haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Final Endorsement

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of hidden nuances and banking my earned gold every session to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, such as fresh adventurers and items I can buy during a run. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I have a sense I'll continue attempting that goal when the official release drops. Count me in for the long haul.