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Having experienced in excess of 200 fresh titles this year, It's time to closing the book on 2025. My annual roundup is out in the world, and I am at peace with the concluding selections, even knowing numerous stellar titles may have dropped under the radar. At this point, it's nothing for me to do except relax, take a short break, and maybe enjoy a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, discovered one more great game. So much for my plans!

An Early Contender Emerges

During my off-hours play, typically earmarked for a handful of quirky titles, I've come across what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that breaks down a classic labyrinth explorer into a probability-fueled game of high stakes danger and payoff. Consider this an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy being aware of a game before it's cool, test out Sol Cesto so you can burn a spot in your indie credit card.

A Calculated Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's different from everything I'm familiar with. The setup is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from the fantasy world. Mechanically, this results in some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer with their own parameters and powers, fight through each level of enemies, pick up some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Core Mechanic

The way you truly navigate a chamber, is unique. Every time you start another stage, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. Every tile either contains a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To explore a room, you just select on one of the four rows, but which square you select is a matter of probability.

You may face a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a treasure chest in it. You start with a quarter likelihood of selecting a specific tile in a row.

After that, the odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you opt on a different row first and attempt some safer moves early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic in action in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get an understanding of it.

Influencing Chance

The roguelike twist is that your probabilities can be influenced through a run by picking up teeth that alter which objects you're more likely to land on. For example, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of getting a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about manipulating math as best you can to have a higher chance at getting your desired outcome.
• On a particular session, I put all my attribute improvements toward melee prowess and picked as many teeth possible that would increase my odds of landing on monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, 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 somewhat constrained, but there's enough to engage with to allow you to tweak probabilities the way you want.

A Persistent Risk

Of course, it remains a game of chance. There remains the possibility that you have a likely outcome to select the desired tile but wind up hitting on an enemy 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 keep clicking or when to move on to the following level as opposed to risking it all.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs assist in minimizing the chance, as do some special skills. One hero's unique ability, charged after making four moves, lets gamers to select a vertical column instead of a horizontal row for that move. If you play your cards right, you can hold that ability for an optimal time to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising amount of nuance in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is currently in development, and it has at least one more update to go before the final game is released. A new character and a additional end-level foe are scheduled to arrive sometime in January. The full launch likely won't be far behind, but the creators haven't committed to a specific release window yet.

A Final Endorsement

Whenever the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your radar. I have been completely engrossed with it, uncovering each of small details and banking my earned gold in each run to access a constant flow of meta progression rewards, including new characters and items available for acquisition during a run. To this day, I have not reached the bottom, and I have a sense I'll continue pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the complete journey.