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Following my time with well over 200 fresh titles this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My annual roundup is live, and I'm satisfied with the final results, despite being aware plenty of fantastic releases likely fell by the wayside. Now, there's plan is to but sit back, take a short break, and maybe enjoy a nice walk in the— ah crap, found another great game. There go my plans!

A Surprising Favorite Surfaces

During my laid-back sessions, typically earmarked for a handful of quirky titles, I've encountered what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of major consequence danger and payoff. Consider this a preview for the in-the-know: If you relish being aware of a game before it hits the mainstream, sample Sol Cesto so you can punch a hole in your wallet for unique titles.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a thought-provoking procedural game that's a departure from all I've previously experienced. The premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, going down level by level in search of the sun, which has vanished from the fantasy world. When you play, this results in some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer who has attributes and skills, fight through each level of foes, acquire some stat improvements (represented as teeth), and vanquish a few stage-ending champions. Straightforward, right!

The Distinctive Core Mechanic

The method by which you effectively complete a dungeon room, though. Whenever you enter a new floor, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. All spaces holds a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To explore a room, you simply click on one of the four rows, but the specific tile you select is determined by luck.

You might see a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a one-in-four probability of selecting any given square in a row.

After that, the odds shift. So do you go for it, or do you choose on a different row first and attempt some safer moves early? This is the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing after you develop its rhythm.

Influencing Chance

The procedural hook is that your percentages can be shaped through a run by gathering teeth that change what things 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 also decrease the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers optimally to have a improved likelihood at selecting the optimal square.
• During one attempt, I invested my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters of that variety.
• In another run, I built my character around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies whenever I secured loot.

The customization choices are somewhat constrained, but it provides ample to engage with to allow you to tweak numbers the way you want.

An Ever-Present Gamble

Unsurprisingly, at its heart, it's a game of chance. There's always the chance that you have an 80% chance to land on the square you want but ultimately choose a monster that would eliminate your final hit point. Every move 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 instead of pushing your luck.

Items like explosive devices assist in minimizing the chance, similar to some hero powers. An adventurer's signature move, charged after selecting four tiles, enables you to select a vertical line rather than a horizontal line for that move. By employing this move wisely, you can reserve that option for the right moment to sidestep a dangerous choice. You'll find an astonishing degree of depth in the basic action of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is remaining in its preview phase, and it has a final update to go before the final game is launched. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are planned for release sometime in January. The 1.0 release probably isn't long after, but the game's developers haven't announced a concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Recommendation

Regardless of when the complete game arrives, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of little secrets and banking my earned gold per attempt to unlock a steady stream of meta progression rewards, featuring new characters and items I can buy while playing. 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. Count me in for the long haul.