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After playing more than 200 new releases this year, I am officially turning the page on 2025. My best-of compilation is published, and I feel content with the final results, even knowing a host of stellar titles likely fell through the cracks. Currently, my only plan is to but sit back, unplug a little, and perhaps take a nice walk in the— well, shoot, found another great game. And just like that, goodbye to my peaceful respite!

A Premature Favorite Surfaces

With my laid-back sessions, often set aside for a selection of unusual games, I've come across potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of significant risk peril and prize. Take this as a hipster's insider tip: If you enjoy being aware of a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's unlike anything I've ever played. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor in search of the sun, which has gone missing from its world. When you play, this results in some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer who has parameters and powers, fight through each level of foes, acquire some stat improvements (which are teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Easy to grasp!

The Novel Central System

The method by which you effectively complete a dungeon room, is unique. Whenever you enter a new floor, you see a 4x4 grid of boxes. All spaces holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To proceed, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the exact space you end up on is a matter of probability.

You may face a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a 25% chance of selecting a particular space in a row.

Then, you'll probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you opt on a safer line first and aim for less risky choices early? This is the push-your-luck gameplay in action in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get an understanding of it.

Influencing Chance

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by picking up teeth that modify the types of squares you're more likely to land on. For example, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of getting a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about manipulating math optimally to have a better shot at selecting the optimal square.
• In one run, I put all my attribute improvements toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• In another run, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are limited, but they are sufficient to experiment with to let you manipulate probabilities according to your strategy.

A Persistent Tension

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have a likely outcome to land on the square you want but end up landing on an enemy that would take out your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you clear a floor out and choose whether to continue selecting or to proceed to the following level as opposed to risking it all.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs help cut down the chance, as do some hero powers. One hero's signature move, powered up by making four moves, enables you to click on a vertical line in place of a row for that move. Should you use this strategically, you can reserve that option for the right moment to sidestep a dangerous choice. You'll find an astonishing amount of nuance in the seemingly straightforward task of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is currently in early access, and it has another update planned before the full version is launched. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are expected to drop before the conclusion of January. The 1.0 release may not be much later, but the creators haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you should consider put Sol Cesto in your sights. I've been completely engrossed with it, uncovering each of small details and banking my earned gold in each run to reveal a continuous trickle of meta progression rewards, featuring new characters and items I can buy while playing. As of now, I am yet to completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I will remain attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the long haul.