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After playing in excess of 200 recent games this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My year-end list is out in the world, and I feel content with the ultimate rankings, accepting that plenty of stellar titles may have dropped under the radar. Now, there's job is to other than unwind, take a short break, and maybe enjoy a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, discovered one more brilliant title. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

An Early Front-Runner Appears

During my off-hours play, typically earmarked for a few oddball curiosities, I've come across what might become my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a conventional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of major consequence danger and payoff. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you take pride being aware of a game before it's popular, test out Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your wallet for unique titles.

A Calculated Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I've ever played. The premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. When you play, that makes for some familiar roguelike structure. Select a character with their own attributes and skills, clear floor after floor of monsters, acquire some permanent upgrades (which are teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Easy to grasp!

The Unique Gameplay Loop

The method by which you truly navigate a area, though. Every time you enter a new floor, the game presents a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To proceed, you simply click on one of the four rows, but which square you select is determined by luck.

You might see a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You begin with a quarter likelihood of landing on any given square in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. So do you take the risk, or do you choose on a different row first and aim for more cautious selections early? Herein lies the tension between chance and safety in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get a feel for it.

Shaping the Odds

The procedural hook is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by collecting teeth that change what things you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you may obtain a perk that will reduce the probability of hitting a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of landing on a reward too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a improved likelihood at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I focused my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth I could that would improve my probability of being drawn to monsters with that damage type.
• On a different attempt, I constructed my hero around treasure chests and combined that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes every time I secured loot.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but it provides ample to engage with to enable you to influence probabilities according to your strategy.

An Ever-Present Tension

Naturally, it's still a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have a likely outcome to hit the square you want but wind up hitting on an enemy that would eliminate your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you navigate a level and determine if to keep clicking or to advance to the next floor rather than testing fate.

Consumables including enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some hero powers. A particular character's unique ability, charged after clearing four squares, lets gamers to click on a vertical column instead of a row for that move. By employing this strategically, you can save that move for the right moment to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is still in early access, and it has at least one more update scheduled before the complete edition is unleashed. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The full launch may not be far behind, but the studio haven't set a concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Thought

Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I have been completely engrossed with it, finding all of small details and storing my run rewards every session to unlock a steady stream of permanent unlocks, including new characters and items I can buy mid-attempt. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I have a sense I'll continue working on that task when the official release drops. Count me in for the long haul.