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Following my time with in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My year-end list is live, and I am at peace with the concluding selections, despite being aware plenty of stellar titles probably slipped by the wayside. At this point, it's job is to except relax, unplug a little, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, stumbled upon a brilliant title. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

With my off-hours play, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've come across what might become my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a classic dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of high stakes peril and prize. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you enjoy in knowing about a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I've previously experienced. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. In practice, this results in some recognizable genre framework. Pick a hero with their own attributes and skills, fight through each level of foes, pick up some passive buffs (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp!

The Novel Core Mechanic

The method by which you actually clear a chamber, however. Whenever you start another stage, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To make a move, you just select on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you land in is up to chance.

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

After that, the odds shift. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you opt on a alternative option first and try to make safer moves early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety on display in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating when you acquire an understanding of it.

Influencing Chance

The meta-layer is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by collecting teeth that change what things you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Creating a build is about manipulating math optimally to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• During one attempt, I put all my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and chose every teeth I could that would improve my probability of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around treasure chests and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes each time I secured loot.

The customization choices are limited, but they are sufficient to experiment with to enable you to influence numbers to your preference.

A Persistent Gamble

Of course, it's still a game of chance. There remains the risk that you have a likely outcome to hit the preferred space but wind up hitting a foe that would deplete your last bit of health. All selections is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you navigate a level and choose whether to continue selecting or when to move on to the subsequent stage as opposed to testing fate.

Items like destructive ordnance assist in minimizing the chance, as do some hero powers. One hero's signature move, charged after clearing four squares, allows players to click on a column rather than a horizontal line during that action. Should you use your cards right, you can hold that ability for an optimal time to sidestep a dangerous choice. There's a shocking degree of depth in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in its preview phase, and it has at least one more update to go until the full version is unleashed. An additional hero and a new boss are expected to drop sometime in January. The official version likely won't be long after, but the game's developers haven't announced a concrete launch day yet.

A Parting Thought

Regardless of when it's fully released, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your radar. I have been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of little secrets and banking my earned gold in each run to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, featuring additional heroes and items I can buy while playing. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll continue pursuing that objective when the full version launches. Sign me up for the long haul.