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Following my time with more than 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I am at peace with the final results, despite being aware plenty of stellar titles may have dropped by the wayside. Now, there's job is to other than unwind, take a short break, and possibly go for a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, discovered one more amazing experience. There go my plans!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

During my off-hours play, typically earmarked for a selection of unusual games, I've encountered what could be my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a classic dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of major consequence peril and prize. Take this as a preview for the in-the-know: If you relish in knowing about a game before it's cool, sample Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your wallet for unique titles.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a tactical roguelike that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The concept is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper in search of the sun, which has gone missing from this mythical realm. Mechanically, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer with their own stats and abilities, fight through each level of monsters, pick up some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and overcome a few biome bosses. Easy to grasp!

The Distinctive Core Mechanic

The way you effectively complete a chamber, however. Whenever you enter a new floor, you see a four-by-four matrix of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the exact space you end up on is determined by luck.

You may face a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a quarter likelihood of hitting a specific tile in a row.

After that, the probabilities change. So do you go for it, or do you choose on a alternative option first and attempt some more cautious selections early? This is the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing after you develop a feel for it.

Influencing Chance

The meta-layer is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by picking up teeth that change what things you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will similarly reduce the odds of finding a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a better shot at landing where you want.
• During one attempt, I put all my power boosts toward melee prowess and picked as many teeth I could that would increase my odds of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I built my character around loot caches and paired that with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters each time I secured loot.

The strategic possibilities are somewhat constrained, but there's enough to experiment with to allow you to tweak numbers to your preference.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Of course, it's still a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have an 80% chance to select the square you want but wind up hitting a foe that would eliminate your final hit point. Every move is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you clear a floor out and determine if to press onward or to advance to the subsequent stage instead of testing fate.

Items like enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some hero powers. One hero's signature move, powered up by selecting four tiles, enables you to choose a column instead of a row during that action. By employing your cards right, you can reserve that option for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising degree of depth in the basic action of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is currently in its preview phase, and it has another update planned before the full version is launched. An additional hero and a new boss are planned for release by the end of January. The 1.0 release likely won't be long after, but the game's developers haven't announced a specific release window yet.

A Final Recommendation

Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. For the past week, I've been thoroughly captivated with it, uncovering each of little secrets and saving my accumulated currency in each run to access a constant flow of permanent unlocks, such as new characters and items available for acquisition during a run. I still haven't found the deepest level, and I have a sense I'll still be attempting that goal when the official release drops. Count me in for the entire experience.