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After playing well over 200 recent games this year, I am officially wrapping things up on 2025. My year-end list is out in the world, and I'm satisfied with the ultimate rankings, even knowing plenty of fantastic releases likely fell under the radar. Currently, my only job is to except relax, unplug a little, and maybe enjoy a pleasant stroll in the— ah crap, found another brilliant title. So much for my peaceful respite!

An Early Favorite Surfaces

In my more off-hours play, often set aside for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of significant risk danger and payoff. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your gaming budget.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The premise is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has gone missing from this mythical realm. When you play, that makes for some familiar roguelike structure. Choose an adventurer with their own attributes and skills, fight through each level of enemies, acquire some passive buffs (which are teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Core Mechanic

How you truly navigate a dungeon room, though. Each instance you start another stage, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To proceed, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but which square you select is a matter of probability.

You could encounter a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a 25% chance of landing on any given square in a row.

After that, the odds shift. So do you take the risk, or do you click on a alternative option first and aim for less risky choices early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The meta-layer is that your odds can be manipulated during an attempt by collecting teeth that alter which objects you're more attracted to. For example, you might get a perk that will reduce the probability of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a improved likelihood at landing where you want.
• In one run, I invested my stat upgrades toward melee prowess and chose every teeth possible that would improve my probability of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I constructed my hero around loot caches and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies every time I secured loot.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but it provides ample to engage with to let you manipulate the odds according to your strategy.

A Constant Risk

Unsurprisingly, it's still a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have an 80% chance to hit the preferred space but ultimately choose a monster that would eliminate your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and choose whether to continue selecting or when to move on to the following level as opposed to risking it all.

Items like explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some hero powers. A particular character's signature move, activated once clearing four squares, enables you to select a vertical column in place of a row during that action. By employing your cards right, you can save that move for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. You'll find an astonishing degree of depth in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is currently in its preview phase, and it has at least one more update scheduled before the full version is released. Another playable adventurer and a fresh guardian are expected to drop before the conclusion of January. The official version may not be much later, but the creators haven't announced a final date yet.

A Concluding Thought

Regardless of when it's fully released, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been thoroughly captivated with it, finding all of little secrets and banking my earned gold per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, such as new characters and items I can buy during a run. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I will remain pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the entire experience.