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Following my time with more than 200 recent games this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the concluding selections, despite being aware plenty of fantastic releases likely fell through the cracks. Now, there's plan is to but sit back, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— ah crap, discovered one more great game. There go my plans!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

During my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've discovered what might become my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional labyrinth explorer into a chance-driven game of significant risk danger and payoff. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you take pride being aware of a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has disappeared from its world. When you play, that makes for some recognizable genre framework. Choose an adventurer who has stats and abilities, fight through each level of enemies, collect some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and overcome a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Novel Gameplay Loop

How you effectively complete a chamber, is unique. Each instance you start another stage, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. Every tile holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To make a move, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you land in is determined by luck.

You might see a row with a pair of enemies, 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.

After that, the odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you click on a alternative option first and attempt some less risky choices early? That's the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing when you acquire a feel for it.

Manipulating Probability

The roguelike twist is that your odds can be manipulated through a run by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're more attracted to. As an instance, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• During one attempt, I put all my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I developed my adventurer around reward boxes and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I opened a chest.

The customization choices are not endless, but there's enough to work with to let you manipulate the odds to your preference.

A Constant Risk

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have a likely outcome to hit the square you want but end up landing on an enemy that would eliminate your remaining life. Every move is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you navigate a level and determine if to keep clicking or when to move on to the next floor rather than testing fate.

Items like explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, just like some character abilities. A particular character's signature move, charged after clearing four squares, allows players to click on a vertical column rather than a row on a turn. If you play this strategically, you can save that move for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising level of strategy in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is currently in its preview phase, and it has at least one more update scheduled until the final game is released. Another playable adventurer and a new boss are planned for release by the end of January. The full launch may not be far behind, but the studio haven't committed to a final date yet.

A Concluding Thought

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you might want to 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 every session to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, featuring fresh adventurers and items I can buy mid-attempt. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I'll still be attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the long haul.