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Following my time with well over 200 fresh titles this year, I am officially closing the book on 2025. My annual roundup is published, and I am at peace with the ultimate rankings, accepting that a host of excellent games may have dropped by the wayside. Now, there's job is to but sit back, disconnect briefly, and maybe enjoy a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, stumbled upon a great game. So much for my plans!

A Surprising Contender Emerges

In my more off-hours play, usually reserved for a few oddball curiosities, I've discovered what might become my first favorite game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a distinctive roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a traditional dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of significant risk risk and reward. Consider this an early adopter's heads-up: If you relish discovering a game before it's cool, give Sol Cesto a try so you can burn a spot in your indie credit card.

A Tactical Roguelike Twist

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's a departure from all I'm familiar with. The concept is that you must venture into a dungeon, going down level by level on a quest for the sun, which has disappeared from its world. When you play, this creates some standard crawl progression. Select a character who has stats and abilities, fight through each level of enemies, pick up some stat improvements (in the form of teeth), and vanquish a few area guardians. Simple enough!

The Unique Core Mechanic

The way you effectively complete a chamber, though. Whenever you begin a fresh level, the game presents a 4x4 grid of boxes. Each square holds a monster, a reward cache, a trap, or a healing strawberry. To make a move, you just select on one of the four rows, but which square you land in is a matter of probability.

You might see a row with a pair of enemies, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a quarter likelihood of landing on a specific tile in a row.

Subsequently, your odds shift. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you choose on a alternative option first and aim for more cautious selections early? That's the tension between chance and safety at play in Sol Cesto, and it's captivating once you get a feel for it.

Shaping the Odds

The meta-layer is that your percentages can be shaped during an attempt by collecting teeth that modify the types of squares you're drawn toward. To illustrate, you could acquire a perk that will decrease your odds of encountering a trap, but will also decrease the odds of getting a treasure chest too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics optimally to have a higher chance at landing where you want.
• On a particular session, I focused my stat upgrades toward physical attack/defense and picked as many teeth possible that would boost my chances of landing on monsters with that damage type.
• During a separate session, I developed my adventurer around reward boxes and paired that with a perk that would debuff nearby foes every time I secured loot.

The customization choices are not endless, but they are sufficient to work with to let you manipulate the odds the way you want.

A Constant Risk

Of course, it remains a game of chance. You constantly face the chance that you have a likely outcome to land on the square you want but wind up hitting on an enemy that would deplete your last bit of health. Each click is a gamble, so a persistent nervousness exists as you work through a stage and choose whether to keep clicking or to proceed to the following level as opposed to pushing your luck.

Tools such as enemy-killing bombs aid in reducing the chance, as do some character abilities. One hero's unique ability, activated once making four moves, lets gamers to choose a column instead of a horizontal row for that move. Should you use this move wisely, you can hold that ability for an optimal time to circumvent a perilous selection. You'll find an astonishing amount of nuance in the basic action of clicking.

Future Development

Sol Cesto is remaining in development, and it has at least one more update scheduled before the final game is released. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are planned for release sometime in January. The 1.0 release likely won't be far behind, but the studio haven't committed to a concrete launch day yet.

A Concluding Thought

Regardless of when it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto on your wishlist. I've been completely engrossed with it, finding all of hidden nuances and banking my earned gold per attempt to reveal a continuous trickle of persistent upgrades, including new characters and items I can buy while playing. To this day, I have not found the deepest level, and I have a sense I'll still be pursuing that objective when 1.0 finally hits. Count me in for the entire experience.