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Having experienced well over 200 new releases this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, even knowing a host of stellar titles may have dropped under the radar. Currently, my only plan is to but sit back, take a short break, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— oh no, found another amazing experience. So much for my intentions!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

With my off-hours play, often set aside for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of significant risk risk and reward. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride being aware of a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I'm familiar with. The concept is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from the fantasy world. When you play, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Pick a hero with their own attributes and skills, fight through each level of foes, acquire some permanent upgrades (represented as teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp!

The Distinctive Gameplay Loop

How you truly navigate a area, is unique. Whenever you start another stage, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the exact space you land in is determined by luck.

You may face a row with multiple foes, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You initially will have a quarter likelihood of hitting any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your chances are recalculated. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you opt on a different row first and attempt some safer moves early? This is the push-your-luck gameplay on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop an understanding of it.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by picking up teeth that modify the types of squares you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will reduce the probability of landing on a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about manipulating math optimally to have a better shot at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I invested my attribute improvements toward melee prowess and chose every teeth possible that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around reward boxes and combined that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters every time I claimed a reward.

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

An Ever-Present Tension

Naturally, it's still a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have a high probability to land on the square you want but ultimately choose a monster that would take out 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 advance to the next floor instead of pushing your luck.

Consumables including explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, similar to some character abilities. A particular character's special power, activated once clearing four squares, lets gamers to click on a column instead of a horizontal row for that move. Should you use this strategically, you can reserve that option for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has at least one more update to go until the complete edition is released. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are expected to drop by the end of January. The 1.0 release probably isn't long after, but the studio haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

No matter when the complete game arrives, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of small details and banking my earned gold in each run to access a constant flow of persistent upgrades, such as additional heroes and items purchasable while playing. As of now, I am yet to reached the bottom, and I suspect I'll still be working on that task when the full version launches. Sign me up for the entire experience.