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Having experienced well over 200 recent games this year, I'm formally wrapping things up on 2025. My year-end list is live, and I feel content with the final results, despite being aware a host of fantastic releases may have dropped by the wayside. Currently, my only nothing for me to do but sit back, disconnect briefly, and possibly go for a nice walk in the— well, shoot, stumbled upon a amazing experience. There go my intentions!

A Surprising Front-Runner Appears

In my more casual gaming time, typically earmarked for a few oddball curiosities, I've encountered what could be my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a traditional labyrinth explorer into a luck-based game of high stakes danger and payoff. View this a hipster's insider tip: If you relish in knowing about a game before it's popular, sample Sol Cesto so you can make a dent in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's a departure from all I'm familiar with. The premise is that you need to explore a dungeon, progressing deeper and deeper on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from its world. In practice, this results in some familiar roguelike structure. Select a character who has stats and abilities, defeat enemies on every stage of monsters, pick up some permanent upgrades (which are teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Gameplay Loop

The way you actually clear a area, is unique. Every time you start another stage, you're shown a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square either contains a monster, a loot box, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To proceed, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but the exact space you land in is determined by luck.

You might see a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You begin with a one-in-four probability of selecting any given square in a row.

Then, you'll odds shift. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you opt on a safer line first and try to make safer moves early? This is the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's engrossing once you get a feel for it.

Manipulating Probability

The procedural hook is that your odds can be manipulated during an attempt by picking up teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of landing on a trap, but will also decrease the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Crafting a loadout is about tweaking the numbers to the utmost to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• In one run, I focused my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and selected all the teeth I could that would increase my odds of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would reduce the power of surrounding monsters whenever I opened a chest.

The build options are not endless, but they are sufficient to engage with to let you manipulate numbers to your preference.

A Constant Risk

Naturally, it remains a game of chance. There remains the chance that you have an 80% chance to land on the preferred space but wind up hitting a monster that would take out your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and determine if to keep clicking or to proceed to the following level rather than testing fate.

Items like destructive ordnance aid in reducing the chance, similar to some character abilities. A particular character's unique ability, powered up by making four moves, allows players to choose a column rather than a row during that action. By employing your cards right, you can save that move for the right moment to avoid a risky decision. It's a surprising level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

The Road to 1.0

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has a final update scheduled before the full version is released. Another playable adventurer and a new boss are scheduled to arrive before the conclusion 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 Concluding Recommendation

No matter when it's fully released, you ought to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been positively obsessed with it, finding all of small details and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, such as additional heroes and items I can buy while playing. I still haven't completed the dungeon, and I get the feeling I'll still be pursuing that objective when the official release drops. Sign me up for the entire experience.