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After playing more than 200 recent games this year, I'm formally turning the page on 2025. My year-end list is live, and I feel content with the concluding selections, even knowing a host of fantastic releases probably slipped under the radar. Currently, my only plan is to but sit back, disconnect briefly, and perhaps take a pleasant stroll in the— oh no, discovered one more amazing experience. So much for my peaceful respite!

A Premature Contender Emerges

In my more laid-back sessions, usually reserved for a selection of unusual games, I've encountered what could be my initial top game of 2026. Sol Cesto is an unusual roguelike for Windows PC that reimagines a conventional dungeon crawler into a chance-driven game of significant risk risk and reward. Take this as an early adopter's heads-up: If you enjoy in knowing about a game before it's popular, give Sol Cesto a try so you can make a dent in your wallet for unique titles.

A Tactical Dungeon-Crawling Innovation

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's different from everything I've ever played. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, going down level by level in search of the sun, which has gone missing from this mythical realm. In practice, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer with their own stats and abilities, fight through each level of foes, acquire some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Novel Core Mechanic

How you truly navigate a area, however. Whenever you enter a new floor, you see a sixteen-square board of boxes. Every tile features a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a health-restoring fruit. To make a move, you choose on one of the four rows, but the specific tile 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 initially will have a 25% chance of landing on any given square in a row.

After that, the odds shift. The question becomes: Do you go for it, or do you opt on a different row first and aim for more cautious selections early? Herein lies the risk-reward dynamic at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating once you get its rhythm.

Shaping the Odds

The procedural hook is that your odds can be manipulated over the course of a session by collecting teeth that change what things you're more attracted to. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will lower your chances of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of landing on a treasure chest too.

• Creating a build is about tweaking the numbers as best you can to have a better shot at getting your desired outcome.
• During one attempt, I invested my stat upgrades toward brute force and selected all the teeth I could that would boost my chances of being drawn to monsters aligned with that strength.
• During a separate session, I built my character around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes every time I opened a chest.

The strategic possibilities are not endless, but they are sufficient to work with to enable you to influence probabilities according to your strategy.

A Persistent Tension

Unsurprisingly, it remains a game of chance. There's always the risk that you have an 80% chance to land on the square you want but end up landing a monster that would eliminate your remaining life. All selections is a gamble, so there's a constant tension as you work through a stage and decide when to keep clicking or to proceed to the next floor instead of pushing your luck.

Items like enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, as do some special skills. A particular character's signature move, activated once selecting four tiles, allows players to select a column in place of a horizontal line for that move. If you play this strategically, you can hold that ability for a crucial point to circumvent a perilous selection. It's a surprising degree of depth in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has at least one more update planned until the final game is unleashed. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are planned for release sometime in January. The official version likely won't be much later, but the game's developers haven't set a final date yet.

A Concluding Endorsement

Whenever the complete game arrives, you should consider put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been completely engrossed with it, uncovering each of little secrets and saving my accumulated currency per attempt to unlock a steady stream of permanent unlocks, featuring fresh adventurers and items purchasable during a run. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I suspect I'll still be working on that task when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the entire experience.