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After playing more than 200 fresh titles this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My year-end list is out in the world, and I am at peace with the final results, even knowing numerous stellar titles may have dropped through the cracks. Now, there's job is to other than unwind, take a short break, and maybe enjoy a pleasant stroll in the— ah crap, discovered one more brilliant title. There go my peaceful respite!

An Early Contender Emerges

During my casual gaming time, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, 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 classic dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of major consequence risk and reward. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish discovering a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your gaming budget.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's a departure from all I've ever played. The premise is that you must venture into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from its world. When you play, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Choose an adventurer with their own stats and abilities, fight through each level of foes, acquire some passive buffs (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Unique Core Mechanic

How you truly navigate a chamber, though. Whenever you enter a new floor, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. All spaces either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you land in is a matter of probability.

You may face 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 hitting a particular space in a row.

Then, you'll probabilities change. So do you press your luck, or do you click on a safer line first and attempt some more cautious selections early? Herein lies the push-your-luck gameplay on display in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by collecting teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. For example, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about manipulating math optimally to have a higher chance at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I put all my attribute improvements toward physical attack/defense and picked as many teeth possible that would improve my probability of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I constructed my hero around loot caches and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes every time I claimed a reward.

The strategic possibilities are limited, but it provides ample to engage with to enable you to influence numbers according to your strategy.

A Constant Gamble

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There remains the possibility that you have a high probability to select the square you want but end up landing a monster that would deplete your final hit point. Each click is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and determine if to press onward or to advance to the next floor rather than risking it all.

Consumables including explosive devices aid in reducing the chance, similar to some character abilities. A particular character's unique ability, activated once clearing four squares, enables you to click on a vertical column in place of a horizontal row on a turn. Should you use this strategically, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. There's a shocking amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is still in development, and it has at least one more update planned until the full version is unleashed. A new character and a additional end-level foe are expected to drop by the end of January. The official version may not be long after, but the creators haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Concluding Thought

No matter when its 1.0 launch occurs, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your radar. For the past week, I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of little secrets and banking my earned gold in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, featuring fresh adventurers and items available for acquisition while playing. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I will remain pursuing that objective when the full version launches. I'm committed for the entire experience.