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Following my time with well over 200 recent games this year, It's time to wrapping things up on 2025. My best-of compilation is published, and I feel content with the final results, even knowing numerous stellar titles likely fell by the wayside. Currently, my only nothing for me to do other than unwind, take a short break, and possibly go for a refreshing hike in the— well, shoot, discovered one more amazing experience. So much for my peaceful respite!

A Premature Front-Runner Appears

With my casual gaming time, usually reserved for a handful of quirky titles, I've discovered potentially my earliest beloved game of 2026. Sol Cesto is a peculiar roguelike for Windows PC that deconstructs a conventional dungeon crawler into a probability-fueled game of significant risk peril and prize. Consider this a hipster's insider tip: If you take pride in knowing about a game before it hits the mainstream, give Sol Cesto a try so you can punch a hole in your indie credit card.

A Strategic Genre Subversion

Sol Cesto is a strategy-focused dungeon crawler that's unlike anything I've ever played. The concept is that you are tasked with descending into a dungeon, descending floor after floor on a quest for the sun, which has vanished from this mythical realm. In practice, that makes for some standard crawl progression. Choose an adventurer with their own parameters and powers, clear floor after floor of enemies, collect some permanent upgrades (in the form of teeth), and defeat a few biome bosses. Simple enough!

The Distinctive Central System

How you effectively complete a dungeon room, however. Each instance you start another stage, you're shown a sixteen-square board of boxes. Each square features a monster, a treasure chest, a trap, or a life-giving berry. To make a move, you choose on one of the horizontal lines, but the specific tile you end up on is up to chance.

You may face a row with two monsters, a strawberry, and a reward box in it. You start with a one-in-four probability of selecting a particular space in a row.

Subsequently, your probabilities change. The question becomes: Do you press your luck, or do you click on a alternative option first and aim for safer moves early? That's the push-your-luck gameplay at play in Sol Cesto, and it's absorbing once you get its rhythm.

Manipulating Probability

The meta-layer is that your odds can be manipulated through a run by collecting teeth that alter which objects you're more likely to land on. To illustrate, you might get a perk that will decrease your odds of hitting a trap, but will concurrently lower the odds of finding a reward too.

• Developing a strategy is about influencing the statistics to the utmost to have a higher chance at selecting the optimal square.
• On a particular session, I focused my power boosts toward brute force and selected all the teeth possible that would improve my probability of attracting me toward monsters with that damage type.
• In another run, I developed my adventurer around loot caches and coupled it with a perk that would weaken adjacent enemies each time I claimed a reward.

The build options are not endless, but they are sufficient to work with to enable you to influence numbers the way you want.

An Ever-Present Tension

Naturally, it's still a game of chance. There's always the possibility that you have an 80% chance to select the desired tile but wind up hitting a monster that would take out your final hit point. Every move is a gamble, so you feel ongoing pressure as you work through a stage and decide when to press onward or when to move on to the next floor rather than risking it all.

Tools such as destructive ordnance aid in reducing the chance, just like some hero powers. One hero's special power, activated once making four moves, enables you to choose a vertical line instead of a horizontal row on a turn. By employing your cards right, you can save that move for a crucial point to avoid a risky decision. You'll find an astonishing level of strategy in the simple act of clicking.

Looking Ahead

Sol Cesto is currently in its preview phase, and it has at least one more update to go until the final game is launched. An additional hero and a fresh guardian are expected to drop sometime in January. The 1.0 release may not be much later, but the game's developers haven't announced a final date yet.

A Concluding Thought

Whenever it's fully released, you might want to put Sol Cesto in your sights. For the past week, I've been positively obsessed with it, uncovering each of little secrets and banking my earned gold in each run to unlock a steady stream of persistent upgrades, featuring new characters and items I can buy mid-attempt. As of now, I am yet to found the deepest level, and I suspect I will remain attempting that goal when 1.0 finally hits. Sign me up for the entire experience.